hudebnik

Three weeks ago we attended a recorder workshop at which the afternoon was devoted to playing on Renaissance instruments: I think everybody in the room had at least two or three Prescotts, and two people had Prescott C-basses. A day or two later we got an e-mail from the Prescotts saying one of their customers had returned a C-bass for them to sell on consignment; after a day's debate, we jumped on it, and Friday two weeks ago we got a box containing... the foot joint, bocal, paperwork, and a couple of neck straps. The rest of the instrument had been shipped in a separate box, which according to the online tracker was at a sorting facility in Brooklyn.

The following Monday, according to the online tracker, it was "in transit" from Brooklyn to Queens. Several more times that week, according to the online tracker, it was "in transit" from Brooklyn to Queens. I filled out an online form to find out where the package really was and why it hadn't been delivered yet, then called the Post Office and was directed to the same online form. The following Monday, according to the online tracker, it was "in transit" from Brooklyn to Queens. On Wednesday, according to the online tracker, it was "expected to be delivered Thursday", and on Thursday it was actually delivered, over two weeks after it had arrived in Brooklyn. It's gorgeous, it has a solid low C (equivalent to the low C for a tenor singer), and with a few weird unintuitive fingerings it's capable of playing over two octaves, up to the low D on a soprano recorder. Now we just need to find opportunities to play it with people....

And finally, yesterday's weather forecast rain or perhaps a few flakes of snow, but overnight it snowed, enough to stick on the ground, looks like about two or three inches. Not enough to be a serious nuisance, but enough to be pretty and Christmas-y. If the weather forecasts are right this time, it should stick around for at least a few days, although it may melt by Christmas proper.

On Thursday, nine days ago, road repair crews ripped up several blocks of 84th Avenue, from two to five blocks east of our house. The next day, they ripped up several more blocks, from two blocks east to two blocks west of our house. Then there was a three-day weekend, so nothing was done until Tuesday. On Tuesday, they ripped up a block of Myrtle Avenue, the somewhat-larger residential thoroughfare (with a stripe down the middle, and all!) that meets 84th at a 45-degree angle. On Wednesday, they ripped up several more blocks of Myrtle Avenue. I'm not sure what happened Thursday or Friday, but so far there has been no sign of pouring new asphalt in any of these places.

I've never poured asphalt in my life. My impulse, if I were leading such a project with a single team, would be to rip up a section of road one day, pour a new surface on it the next day, rip up another section the next day, pour a new surface the next, and so on. Probably more efficient, I would have a ripping team and a pouring team, with different equipment and expertise, with the pouring team following one day behind the ripping team.

There are possibly good reasons one might not do it that way. For example, it might be that pouring new asphalt is an order of magnitude faster than ripping up old asphalt, so it doesn't make sense to send out the pouring team for a day until the ripping team has ripped enough road to give the pouring team a full day's work. This seems unlikely, on the general principle that it's easier to destroy something than to create it (entropy and all that), but possible.

Or maybe it's considered helpful to expose the underlayer of road to the elements for a week or two before pouring a new layer of asphalt on top. Again, this seems unlikely -- I would think that would add unpredictability to the process and variability to the materials, producing a worse result -- but possible.

I think the most likely explanation is organizational: for some random reason involving paperwork and/or personalities, the ripping team got moving and the pouring team didn't. The pouring team is passive-aggressively waiting for something before getting to work, while the ripping team passive-aggressively continues doing its job to call attention to the lack of followup by the pouring team.

Anyway, the effect is a lot of bumpy road surface, a lot of intermittently blocked streets, a lot of traffic jams, a few parked cars getting towed, etc.

I made eleven Paris-pie hand-pies yesterday morning, and we split the leakiest one for lunch. Note to self: at 350°F, the pies leak a bit onto the cookie sheet, and the leakage solidifies and curdles. At 375°F, the same leakage scorches and blackens.

I also braided a lacing cord for shalmestere, about 49" long. Started with FFF beading silk, looped five times around two clamps attached to the dining-room table 60" apart; tied a slip knot in the middle, used its loop as an anchor to braid one half of the cord, then untied the slip knot, and used the loops at the braided end as an anchor to braid the other half of the cord. The only difficulty was finding the five loops after undoing the slip knot, because they had tangled around one another while I braided the first half. Perhaps if I put them on a comb, or put a weight on each of them? Still need to attach an aiglet to one end of the cord. She has some commercial aiglets of silver or silver-gilt, which would be cool, or I could just make one of sheet brass.

I also made and attached a neck facing to a linen shirt that we just converted from one of D's smocks, and that appeared to be splitting a bit between the shoulder blades.

I also finished machine-sewing the new valence to the tent roof, then went around the bottom of the valence with pinking shears to give it a crenellated effect. I don't want to put too much work into this 25-year-old tent, because I very much hope to have the new tent finished by next summer.

I discovered yesterday that the trailer's registration hasn't been renewed since 2019 (a lot of things haven't happened since 2019!), so I probably need to go to the DMV today to renew it.

[ETA: Went to the DMV, and it went pretty smoothly. They grumbled a little about me not having the title to the trailer, but it wasn't a blocker. They refused to let me keep using my current license plate, but handed me a new one, and don't appear to have charged me anything extra for it. Trailer is now legal. In and out in under an hour.]

And I did some practicing on the noodly line in the Faenza piece we're doing in our concert next week. I've got it mostly off-book, but there are several passages that are almost the same in the A and B sections, but go different places, and I get them mixed up. I plan to perform with music in front of me, but the more memorized it is, the more fluent it'll sound.

Meanwhile, shalmestere finished putting sleeves and gussets on the wool gown that she just repurposed from one of her dresses, and attached a collar. I think we'll want to put a linen lining on the collar, both for comfort and to help the collar stand up straight. She also patched some braes and smocks.

I object on principle to paying a private, for-profit company for the privilege of paying my taxes -- if the government requires me to pay taxes, it's obligated to allow me to pay taxes -- so whenever possible, I do the taxes myself. We make too much money for free e-file from either the Feds or the State, but the Feds offer something called free file fillable forms, which doesn't hold your hand as much as TurboTax but allows you to e-file without paying a private company, and the State of New York offers fill-in PDF versions of most of their forms, which can't be e-filed but can at least be filled in and edited on the computer. Both of these systems have you enter numbers in some fields, and when you're done, they do the arithmetic to fill in other fields.

Anyway, I started working on our taxes a month ago, and ran into a bug in one particular freefilefillableform: every time I told it "I've finished; do the arithmetic and fill in the rest of the fields," it replaced one of my numbers with zero and recalculated everything else accordingly. Which made our total income off by a relatively trivial $300, but I didn't want to file a return that I knew was wrong, so I filed a bug report and waited for them to fix it. Another minor difficulty: my employer's W-2 lists five kinds of non-wage benefits, but freefilefillableforms has room for only four, so the freefilefillableforms documentation tells you to fill out another W-2 with the remaining benefits (and zeroes everywhere else, lest it throw off your total wages), so I did that.

I came back to the taxes last week. The response to my bug report was "we can't reproduce this problem, so we can't fix it," but I tried the form again and now it worked, so I finished up the Federal form, re-did the State form with the right numbers, and was done on Saturday. We owed the Feds a few thousand dollars, but the State owed us almost exactly the same amount, so I filed the State return first (through the mail, on dead trees), then e-filed the Federal return.

The next day there was an e-mail saying the Federal return had been rejected, for two reasons: first, the amount at the bottom of Schedule A didn't match the amount I deducted on the 1040 (because Schedule A is all about itemized deductions, and the standard deduction was larger so I took that instead), and second, I had zero wages on one of my W-2's (because that's what it told me to do if I had more than four kinds of non-wage benefits). The former could be fixed by simply deleting Schedule A, and I didn't see a way to fix the latter, so I resubmitted to see whether it would go through. I thought of putting in a wage of $0.01 on that W-2, but figured that would raise red flags too.

The next day there was another e-mail saying the Federal return was still rejected because of the zero-wage W-2. Elsewhere on the IRS Web site I found the statement that this was a known limitation of freefilefillableforms: that if you have more than four kinds of non-wage benefits, "find another method of e-filing". In other words, pay a private company to allow you to pay your taxes to the government.

So I started the taxes all over from the beginning using TurboTax, which I had used in some previous years when I sold stock or had other complicated stuff going on. And TurboTax helpfully pointed out some sources of income I had forgotten about, e.g. interest on a non-tax-deferred retirement account, and some small amounts of capital gains incurred between the time money was put into that account and the time it was allocated to its ultimate investment destination. As a result, we owed the Feds somewhat more than I originally thought, and the State owed us somewhat less than I originally thought, so I needed to re-file the state form.

One of the annoying and obscure parts of the New York State tax form is "use tax", where they try to recover sales tax for things you bought from other states and didn't pay NY sales tax for. In most cases you can just plug your AGI for the year into a table that tells you what you owe, without itemizing individual purchases (which is good, because in 2020 and 2021 everybody's been mail-ordering a lot of stuff, mostly across state lines!). Only individual purchases over $1000 each need to be itemized, and added to the AGI-based estimate that covers all the small stuff. As it happens, we made two such purchases in 2021, of musical instruments, so I needed to itemize them. There's a Web-based form to do that: it concluded that we owed $1600-odd for the itemized stuff, and $0.02 for everything else. Wait: two cents for all the non-itemized stuff? That doesn't make sense: if we had an AGI under $15K we would owe $3.00, and the table goes up more-or-less-linearly from there. I filled out the Web form again, and it still said two cents for the non-itemized stuff. Again not wanting to submit a form that I knew was wrong, I did the arithmetic myself and filled in the correct use tax (now $1700-odd) on the state form in TurboTax.

Since I had already filed state taxes, this now constituted an amended return, so I told TurboTax that, paid TurboTax for the privilege of obeying the law, and hit the "e-file" button on both Federal and State taxes. TurboTax said that under NY State law, I can't e-file an amendment to a return that was originally filed on paper. It also pointed out that if your use tax is over $1700, you need to file another state form, which TurboTax doesn't support, so again you need to file your NY taxes on paper rather than e-filing. So I filled out the extra form (which says in large letters that it's about "individual purchases over $25K", which I didn't have, and in small print "or if your total use tax is over $1700"), and printed everything out from TurboTax. The printed instructions say "Do not file this return by mail; under New York State law, if you use software to compute your taxes, you must e-file," which they had just told me I couldn't do, for two other reasons. So I printed the form out anyway, then looked it over to make sure things were right.

One of the lines on the NY State Amended Tax Return says "use tax, as it appeared on your original return" (yes, those words are bold-faced on the form). So I compared the $1700-odd use tax I had computed with what was on my original printed return, and they unsurprisingly didn't match. I couldn't change the original use tax in TurboTax, as it had never asked me for my original use tax, so the obvious answer was to cross off the $1700-odd figure and write in the actual original use tax (on a form that also says "No handwritten notes on this form, except signatures"). Then there was the question of how to put in my correct use tax of $1700-odd; there's no blank for that anywhere on the form, and somewhere in the online documentation I found that you can't correct an incorrect use tax using the amended form; you're supposed to use the Web-based form to pay use tax directly online, separate from your yearly tax return. The same Web-based form that says I owe only $0.02 for non-itemized purchases, and if I believe that number I'm under the $1700 threshold, so I don't need the extra form that TurboTax doesn't support, so I can e-file using TurboTax after all, except that I'm amending a return that was originally filed on paper. But TurboTax doesn't actually know about that earlier return, so maybe I can just e-file a non-amended state form through TurboTax, and it'll get there before the paper form. Nope: once you've told it you're amending, you can't back out of that decision.

Anyway, I spent three hours on the phone yesterday with five different people at the state tax department, most of whom seemed to know less about New York State taxes than I did, and were reading the same instructions I was reading as though they'd never seen them before.

I eventually printed everything out on dead trees and mailed it to Albany, where it'll arrive a few days behind my original return. There's almost certainly something wrong somewhere, so this will get sorted out eventually.

The moral of the story is "Kids, don't try this at home; obeying the law is too complicated for ordinary people to do, so you should always hire a professional to do your taxes."

Some European countries, I've been told, don't make you go through this nonsense: the government sends you a form saying "this is how much we think you made, and this is how much we think you owe; have we missed anything?" You check the "OK" box and your taxes are paid.

Several years ago we bought a dehumidifier for our basement. It worked reasonably well until a few months ago when it decided its tank was full (despite having a garden hose that drains it directly into a drain in the floor) so it wouldn't run. Last month we bought a new one (which has worked very well so far) and needed to get rid of the old one. Since a dehumidifier is basically an air conditioner, it uses CFC's as compression-and-expansion gases (PV=NRT, doncha know), and they're a powerful greenhouse gas, so the city requires people to have the CFC's drained before the appliance can be recycled. You have to make a separate appointment for the CFC draining, after which they put a tag on your appliance and it can be picked up on your next recycling day.

So I made an appointment for two weeks ago. When I typed my address into the form, it said (correctly) that I have two curbs, one on the street in front of the house and one behind; which one did I want to leave it at? I checked the box for the street behind the house, the same place I always leave my trash and recyclables. I was supposed to put the dehumidifier out on the curb "after 4 PM on Thursday", and they would come by some time before noon on Friday to salvage the CFC's and tag it. I forgot and didn't put it out until 8 AM, and the city apparently never saw it.

So I made another appointment for last Thursday/Friday, carefully put it out on the curb about 6 PM, and the next morning there was a note on my door saying "we came by at 12:30 AM to drain the CFC's, but we couldn't because the appliance wasn't left on the curb." Which of course it was, exactly where I had said I would put it. Anyway, I made a third appointment for yesterday/today, again checking the box for the street behind our house, and put the dehumidifier out on the curb on the street behind the house at 9:00 Thursday morning (after that morning's trash pickup), to make sure I didn't forget Thursday night.

This morning I went out to walk the dogs, and when we returned via the back of the house, I didn't see the dehumidifier there. No, wait: my dehumidifier was across the street, under the train tracks, where people always dump their trash illegally. And it was mostly disassembled, but it didn't have a Department of Sanitation tag. I moved it back to the curb behind my house and brought the dogs inside. And there was a note on my front door saying "we came by at 8:45 AM to drain the CFC's, but we couldn't because the appliance wasn't left on the curb." This was at 8:51 AM, as though they had come by a minute or two before I returned with the dogs.

I called the city to ask if (a) they could call the truck, which must still be in the neighborhood because it was here five minutes ago, or (b) failing that, they could make yet a fourth appointment. But since the dehumidifier has already been disassembled, probably by metal salvagers, I'm guessing that whatever CFC's were in it have already escaped into the atmosphere. So I'm going to leave it on the curb for recycling, and hope they're willing to take it without a CFC-removal tag. Grump.

I was expecting, by now, to be en route to, if not at, the site for Musicians' Day, an early-music slumber party for thirty friends and acquaintances in a lodge in the woods, with a day of classes, hours of jamming, good food, a roaring fireplace, and all that stuff.

But when the first attendees arrived at the site (several hours before I could get there), they found another group already in the lodge, swearing that they had it reserved through Sunday evening, and had had it reserved since January. (We also were sure we had it reserved since January.) The organizer of the other group works for the Parks Department, and called the Park Superintendent on his private line to see what was up; he says the Superintendent confirms that he has the lodge reserved and we don't. I haven't talked to the Superintendent myself, nor have I been able to get anybody at the park to answer a phone in several days -- I've spent at least an hour wandering through touch-tone phone trees searching in vain for a human being.

Anyway, the event is cancelled on the shortest of notice. A good number of the attendees are probably still on the road driving to the site, and others may arrive tomorrow morning. #^*%^$^&%$*%^&

Should I be concerned that the New York City Department of Finance is headquartered in Newark, NJ?

A few years ago Congress passed a law allowing employers to provide tax-free fringe benefits to their employees for parking and public-transit expenses involved in commuting to work. They started with a limit of $100/month for public transit and $200 or so for parking, both to be indexed automatically to inflation; for 2007, it's up to $110/month for public transit.

( Of bureaucracies and laws )

Much of today was given over to a department retreat: the other three computer science faculty in my department came over to my house and we spent six hours discussing various courses, what they're supposed to achieve, and "learning outcomes assessment", i.e. how we're going to tell whether the students have actually learned what we said we wanted them to learn. This is not quite the same thing as grading. First, grades in one course are affected not only by learning in that course but by learning in other courses. Second, a student who has achieved B-level command of all the topics in a course gets the same letter grade as one who has achieved A-level mastery in some topics and C-level competence in others. Third, in learning outcomes assessment we usually don't care what individual students have achieved (to draw conclusions about the student), but rather what the mean or median student has achieved (to draw conclusions about the curriculum and the teaching). A letter grade is too specific in the temporal and student dimensions and too broad in the subject dimension.

Anyway, assessment (particularly of student work this year) was the top item on the agenda for today. We didn't actually get to any of it, as we spent the entire six hours coming up with general goals, a few words each, for each course, goals that in many cases could have been found in the existing course descriptions. What a waste of time. Not that the outcomes-assessment was likely to be any more pleasant or productive, but we're supposed to produce a report about it in the next month.

On the bright side, shalmestere and I got the house cleaner than it's been in months, in preparation for my colleagues coming over. So at least the living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and upstairs hallway are more pleasant places to be.