A taxing weekend

I must have missed something, because I was able to get our 2000 taxes done (both Federal and State) in less than 6 hours on the computer, and that’s much faster than usual. Either that, or Intuit really did improve TurboTax a lot this year — I hardly had to fight with it at all to get my data transferred from Quicken and matched up with my W-2s and 1099s. I think they loosened the linkages between the two programs this year, which made it easier to fix mistakes, too.

When I wasn’t working on taxes, I was at Shir Hadash, listening to our Scholar-in-Residence, David Kaufman from Hebrew Union College in LA. He gave four talks this weekend; I missed Friday’s while flying home from Boston. Yesterday’s was on the evolution of American Judaism, with a special emphasis on the Reform movement (and the changes which have occurred to make Reform services become more like traditional services (with Hebrew and kippot and tallisim), unlike the way it was when I was growing up and occasionally attended services at Beth Ahabah in Richmond). And this morning, we spent 90 minutes on the Jewish contribution to American humor — complete with video clips of the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Woody Allen, and Saturday Night Live. Great fun, somewhat educational, and much nicer than working on taxes!