14-April-99 Done taxes

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No excuses, I'm always about this late with income tax. We don't seem to get refunds these days, with the empty nest and paid off mortgage. I'm not complaining about that; somehow I never properly caught on to the idea of being opposed to taxes. I really feel that taxes are a case of let's everybody chip in and we can do something that will benefit us all. Of course I don't like everything the money goes for, but lots of people don't like things I'm happy my money goes for. Even though I may not mind, I'm not in a hurry to send another check to Washington.

However, with taxes done I should have a little more time to write and work on the Zum Gali Gali web site. We got a nicely decorated envelope today; that used to be the rule for stampers, but in the last year or two it has become less and less common. If you have lots of time to let things download, or a fast internet connection, you can see it at the Zum Gali Gali Envelope Gallery

Yesterday there was a meeting of the Newton Bicycle and Pedestrian Task Force. We were in the basement of City Hall, in the Planning Department conference room. It's a fish bowl, glass along one long side and a third of each of the short sides, carved out of a wide part of the hall. There's a big (I mean about six feet square) map of the city on the no-glass wall with every house plot shown and color codes for zoning. That's zoning as in "zoned for light industry" or "residential 1", not "zoned out," though I can be that too by 9 PM. I like to look at it and see which streets I've explored recently whenever the discussion gets a little dull. We were trying to find what our strategy is for getting the aldermen to approve $11K to produce a bicycle plan for the city. There is a state law requiring provision of bicycle facilities on streets rebuilt with state money, but the law allows waivers from that. Our problem is to minimize the requests for waivers by establishing what streets can reasonably have bike lanes or wide shoulders. We don't want to cut down trees or cut into people's front yards, but we don't want the public works department to get a free pass for a waiver on every street.

The choir rehearsal tonight had all four Jewish choirs that will be performing at the Project Manna concert in two weeks. That means we had four different directors conducting us. Our cantor introduced, to rehearse the first piece, “long ago and far away, from the mystical land beyond the mountains,” Laurel Zar-Kessler of Beth El of Sudbury. She has a beautiful smile to go with a fine voice, and told us to keep the image of Jerusalem in our mind as we sung “Samachti,” the setting of Psalm 122 including the verse “pray for the wellbeing of Jerusalem.” We did the last two measures three times instead of two as written, because it wasn't loud enough for her the second time. “Build it up in the second half,” she said. “Make it strong the first time, but save a little, so at the end you're singing the loudest you love to sing.”