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!

I expect to be going to Israel in a couple of weeks to help with the opening of the W3C’s new Office there; as long as I have to be on the eastern side of the Atlantic, I will also be handling some business in England and then attending an IBM meeting in Paris. The timing of all this leaves me over there a weekend — while I could, in theory, go home for the weekend, in practice, I’d spend nearly 24 hours in airplane seats and have almost three hours at home to show for it.

So I was originally planning to spend the weekend in Paris, getting ready for the meeting which starts there on a Monday. Paris in the Spring is very nice (I think they’ve even written songs about it!), though I’d prefer not to be there by myself — but I might have found something better to do.

I’ve been a fan of The Prisoner for a long time; Diane and I even drove to Portmerion on a trip to England just so we could see the place (it looks bigger on TV than in reality). So how can I resist going to a Prisoner convention, in Portmerion, on the weekend I’m free? Of course, I need to consider the small danger of being unable to leave the Village when I want to….and the not-so-small problem of getting to Paris on time even if I do leave when I want. So I’ll probably do Paris anyway, but….