After our usual Sunday quick dash to the Farmers’ Market and walk through Los Gatos, we came home for two interesting sessions.

The first was hosted by Shir Hadash and was a panel discussion (well, three presentations) on “Medical Ethics: Rationing of Limited Resources During COVID-19 Pandemic”. The three panelists were all physician-members of Shir Hadash with well over a century of experience between them. The discussion touched on the history of dialysis (before it was added to Medicare in 1972), HIV/AIDS treatment, and, of course, COVID-19. The discussion was lively but sobering.

The second was much more fun – the Remote Shakespeare Company (two-thirds of the Reduced Shakespeare Company) took us on a quick and reduced tour of their material, including the first scene of “Hamlet’s Big Adventure (a prequel)”, which we were hoping was going to come to the Bay Area this year. Some day….

And speaking of “some day”, I got started on the first small bit of preparation for the High Holy Days. I do the data processing for the honors, but this year, we have a lot of changes to make because of COVID-19 – there will be far fewer honors (services will be online, not in person), but the Rabbi doesn’t want to lose track of what we normally would do (especially since we will have a new interim rabbi next year), so I had to figure out how to tell my programs to ignore honors we’re omitting.

That proved to be surprisingly easy – but what turned out to be hard was updating the master honors sheet to reflect what we did last year (I reworked most of my code last year, so this was the first time I’d needed to do this). I think it’s done, but I’m going to take another look tomorrow before I tell the Rabbi to go ahead.

Betty, one of my college classmates, commented on Facebook about my blog posting of yesterday:

If I were writing a blog, it would be boring. I read, I did puzzles, I exercised, I went to the doctor, I cooked. Next day, ditto. Although I did make empanadas and samosas this week.

Well, Betty, today’s entry is for you!

The most useful thing I did today was to file our taxes – they were actually finished months ago, but I didn’t get around to filing them until today. I wasn’t in a hurry since we not only weren’t getting a refund but we had to make some hefty payments and I had to free up some cash to make that possible. When the SECURE Act was passed late last year, I realized that it made sense to move money from our traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs – but I hadn’t planned for that during the year, so the last-second move significantly increased our tax liability for 2019.

And we did another Roth conversion this year – I am pretty sure that tax rates are going to go up in a year or two to help pay for the (very necessary) deficits that the government incurred this year for pandemic aid, and I’d rather pay at today’s relatively low rates and avoid being taxed later. So we had to free up funds to pay 2020 estimated taxes, and again, I wasn’t in any hurry to do so.

But July 15 is looming, so today was the day to actually deal with the taxes instead of just dreading dealing with them. The process was fairly painless – the worst thing was discovering that I couldn’t get into EFTPS for some reason and having to find an alternate way to queue up our estimated tax payments.

But it’s done for another year…well, another 9 months. I suspect next year’s deadline will be back to April 15.

Other than that, it was a quiet day; no new recipes, not much culture (we did watch the first episode of Silicon Valley Shakespeare’s Bard Talk, but that was it), and only a quick trip to Manresa Bread to pick up a loaf of levain that I’d pre-ordered. I have done well at hacking away at my inbox, but I haven’t achieved Inbox Zero, so I have nothing to brag about on that front.

Life goes on!