59’th year – Page 7

Networking success

I told you I was having trouble getting my sister’s computer upgraded to a modern setup.
We now have a wireless router installed. I can connect wirelessly to the network via her desktop on windows and linux, and via my laptop on Linux.
I tried installing her new monitor, but it turns out to be DOA.
Linux is running her display at 800×640, so it isn’t very usable. If her new monitor worked, I would play with this more, but since she doesn’t use it, and I have the laptop, this doesn’t make sense to waste time on now.
You can complain about computers being user-unfriendly, but networking is definitely lots easier than it used to be. When I set up my router at home with the new Comcast connection, I had to manually clone the mac address from the computer Comcast had originally connected to to the router. If that happened here, it was transparent to the user.
Of course, it doesn’t look like you would be able to set up this router from Linux at all, unless there’s some magic screen on the network interface I haven’t found. But maybe you could run the setup program under WINE.

Christmas Eve in the melting pot

The clash between family tradition and the American protestant tradition was even more plangent with my sister’s new church.

The Polish tradition is to have a large meal on Christmas Eve and then go to midnight mass. The American protestant tradition is to have a church service on Christmas Eve, and then the large meal on Christmas day.

Since my sister has been a church organist in protestant churches, we’ve had to reschedule the large meal, usually to be after the service. But this year, she had to play two services: one at 5 and one at 10, so she didn’t get home until well after midnight. Her current church is an hour’s drive away, so she had family dinner with the pastor, and my mother an I ate a fairly simplified version of the Wigilia meal, and we exchanged presents after midnight.

One church she played at had a large population of Liberian immigrants, who also have their large family dinner on Christmas Eve. So they just didn’t come to church at all. So I never saw the whole choir or heard the wonderful congregational singing my sister kept telling me about, because it didn’t happen on Christmas Eve.

I tried telling them about the Mexican tradition of having the large dinner after Midnight Mass and then exchanging presents and then going to bed on Christmas morning, but they weren’t interested in adopting that one. It probably works better for people who normally eat late in the evening than for people who eat at 6.

Kolya

This movie is set in Prague in 1988 at the end of the communist regime. It’s a heart-warming look at the effect of politics on personal relationships.
It’s the European kind of good movie, with subways that look like subways and apartments of starving musicians that don’t look like Hollywood sets. I particularly enjoyed the view of the scary escalator in the subway station from the point of view of the 5 year old boy.

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Woes of an Executrix: taxes

I swore I’d get the First and Final Accounting of Bonnie’s
estate done by today, so I’ve chained myself to the desk and I’m
working on it.

This means I don’t have time to write anything new today, but
it also means I’ve been reading a lot of the stuff I wrote when
I was trying to figure out the taxes and such.

Here’s my
description of trying to deal with the IRS on the phone:

I finally decided I had to do something about the taxes, so I called
the IRS. They played me the Blue Danube Waltz for 45 minutes or so
and then someone came on and told me what number form I needed to send
in so that she could talk to me about Bonnie’s taxes. She wanted to
tell me a fax number, but I told her that faxing was a pain so I
needed snail mail or email. So they played the Blue Danube Waltz for
a while longer, and then she gave me an address. I should have looked
at the form while she did that, because it turns out to be a Power of
Attorney form, and it isn’t at all clear that it applies to an
Executrix.

Did you do anything like this? Do you have any way of finding out
what an executrix needs to do to get tax information? I can go
downtown with the shoebox and see if they’ll help me if I talk to them
in person. I can send in form 2848 with none of the boxes checked and
a note that they should have another box if this is the right form,
but that seems like a pretty forlorn hope.

The upshot was that my tax preparer friend and I went down to
the IRS office in downtown Boston with my executrix appointment
and spoke to a very nice man who gave us printouts of everything
they had in their computers. It turned out that Bonnie hadn’t
filed any tax returns since 1996, and they’d only caught her for
2001. They subsequently caught her for 2006, so the estate ended
up paying a lot of taxes and penalties, but possibly not much more
than she would have paid in taxes if she’d paid the normal
way.

This is not the way those of us who file our taxes every year
believe the system is supposed to work. Nor is it the way the
nice man in the IRS office believed it was supposed to
work, but he didn’t sound real surprised that it had in fact
worked that way.

O Christmas Tree

[naked tree]

Here’s the tree as it came from the tree lot in Porter
Square.

[tree with angel]

Here it is after I trimmed enough off the top that I could put the angel on
and put it on top of the subwoofer.

And here it is trimmed. For some reason this year I didn’t
feel like putting on the origami cranes I made the first year I
had a tree and needed to make decorations. But you can see some
of the toys and costume jewelery I adapted.

[trimmed tree]
[closeup of tree decorations] width=400
[closeup of decorations] width=400

Crêche

[crêche with animals] width=400

I also set up a crêche
that my mother brought me from
Israel. The Thing from the depths of the sea I found on the
sidewalk one Halloween. He fits over a dog toy, and lives in a
box with the angel when he isn’t part of the crêche.

[closeup of crêche]

Another concert excerpt

I did take pictures of the tree, and I’ll figure out how to let
you see them tomorrow, but I don’t have time to struggle with
wordpress and images right now, so here’s another vocal from
Thursday’s concert. Come,
Sirrah Jack, Ho is about the joys of smoking. It’s
one of the ones people use to teach voice independance — the
middle line is really hard if you haven’t gotten the idea that
your voice is completely independant of the others. But if the
other parts are together, and you just start your part one
quarter note after there’s, it turns out to be easy.

Here’s Come,
Sirrah Jack, ho!the
sheet music if you want to play it yourself.

A good three-voice vocal from Thursday

No, just because we had 20 pieces on our program
doesn’t mean I’m going to get 20 posts out of it, but I will
give you some highlights. And tomorrow it’s likely you get
pictures of the Christmas tree, which I’m about to go buy.
After all, if someone’s going to try to both blog and celebrate
the season, you have to expect blog posts that fall out of
celebrating the season.

Love
learns by laughing was the ending number. A
friend who saw the program posting emailed me that her recorder
group always ends with that when they play Morley. We agree
that its a really good ending number. The
sheet music is on SerpentPublications.org
if you want to play it yourself.

How it went yesterday

Yesterday, of course, being the concert
I’ve been telling you about for a couple of months.

The short answer is, pretty well. There were about 50 people, including 6 who came
because we told them to. They seemed happy — we felt completely
justified in doing our encore. I thought we lost them a bit in the
middle, but there weren’t any loud snores and they came back for the
end. I didn’t have any disruptive coughing fits, and although there
were some flubs, we didn’t completely lose it at any point.

We did take some pictures, but I don’t have them yet, because
they’re on someone else’s camera. I’ll probably get several
daily posts out of snippets from the recording, so today I’ll
just give you the one that has the best recorder playing on
it.

It’s the Ricercada
Primera by Diego Ortiz. I’m playing my G alto recorder by
Ralph Netch. I decided last summer that I needed to get more
comfortable on it, so I spent the whole summer playing English
Country Dances on it, both using C fingerings and using G
fingerings, which involve playing up into the third octave.
The bass line is played by Ishmael Stefanov on his 5-stringed
fiddle by Alan Carruth.

I started working on this piece last September, when we’d first
scheduled the concert. I asked my recorder teacher what solo
recorder piece he’d recommend for a concert like this (we didn’t
of course know very much about the actual program then), and
this was what he suggested.

If I’d been using the 465 body, I’d have hit the low G, and I
was hitting it most of the time in rehearsal on the 440 body,
but I flubbed it in actual performance. But otherwise, this is
the kind of Renaissance recorder playing I’m capable of these
days. A year ago there would have been a lot more unintended
spaces and forced (and therefore sharp) high notes.

Gibralter and Christmas

We like to end the three-hour West Gallery Quire
meetings with something rousing that we know well, so that even if
we’ve been struggling with unfamiliar music where the words are on
a different page with the notes, we can go home feeling like we
sound good when we’ve worked through those difficulties.

Last Sunday we were concentrating on Christmas music, much of
which was new, and even the stuff we’ve been playing for years we
mostly haven’t played since last January. There are a couple of
rousing pieces suitable for ending on, but we’d sung those already
when it got to be time for the last number. So our director
suggested that we end with one of our really common (because it’s
really good) ending numbers: Gibralter.

The text is part of Isaac Watts version of Psalm
72:

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun

Does his successive journeys run;

His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,

Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

People and realms of every tongue

Dwell on his love with sweetest song;

And infant voices shall proclaim

Their early blessings on his name.

Blessings abound where’er he reigns,

The pris’ner leaps to lose his chains;

The weary find eternal rest,

And all the sons of want are blest.

Let every creature rise and bring

Peculiar honors to our King;

Angels descend with songs again,

And earth repeat the long Amen.

Bruce was apologetic about Gibralter not being a
Christmas piece, but I said, “It has ‘infant voices’ and
‘angels’ — it’s a lot like Christmas music.”

He added, “Prisoners?”

I don’t see why you couldn’t make a really good Christmas card
with the prisoners leaping to lose their chains.

Science Fiction Best of… lists

I’ve run into a couple that may be useful when you’re looking
for something to read.

This Best
Science Fiction of the decade list is a little odd, but I
like most of what’s on it that I’ve read. I definitely like
some of Cory Doctorow’s later stuff better than Down and
out in the Magic Kingdom, and I don’t understand
leaving out Honor Harrington and Discworld and putting in Harry
Potter but it’s likely that you’ll find something you’ll
enjoy.

Jo Walton’s list of Foolproof
Holiday Gift Books is less pretentious, and possibly more
useful. She includes some of the series (The
Long Price Quartet, Steerswoman’s
Road) that really got me excited about reading the next
book.

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