Woohoo! I finished my taxes today. And they were a lot easier than they’ve been for the past few years because a) I didn’t have any of those annoying 1099 forms that automatically kick you into the longest tax forms there are, and b) I only lived in one state this last year. This means that I went down from about 6 or 8 schedules and the long 1040 form to absolutely no extra schedules, the medium-length 1040a form, and (like I said) state forms for only one state.

The only reason it took me as long as it did today was that I was working on making a spreadsheet for myself so that next year I can fill in a few numbers in a spreadsheet and it’ll give me all the numbers to fill in on my tax forms (a mini-tax program on the cheep). I can even have this thing tell me whether to itemize or take the standard deduction without wracking my brains every year! (In all fairness, my dad is the one who came up with the foundations of this spreadsheet, but this year I tweaked it to get rid of all the things he needed and I don’t, and to add all the things I need that he doesn’t.)

On the down-side, I’m now quite a bit poorer than I was 4 hours ago. I have to remember to talk to HR about taking more out of my paychecks. It’s a lot happier to get money back at the end of the year…

Church choirs are curious things. As the director, I get to work with some of the most friendly people in the church. These are the people that come to services every Sunday (people that travel a lot or don’t attend regularly generally don’t want to commit to a group like this where they might have to let everyone down by not singing with the group in church), and they’re also the doers in the church (after all, they’re committing to yet one more evening every week). But unlike a professional choir, they don’t practice at home, and they don’t worry too much about not coming to practice if their grand kids are in town or if they’re out traveling.

At my church, I have the added challenge of having very few people in the choir. 5 women sing soprano, 2 sing alto (one of whom hardly ever comes to practice), 1 man and 1 woman sing tenor, and 2 men sing bass (one of whom can rarely come to practice, and is also a tenor who’s kindly agreed to help me out by singing bass). Clearly, having one person decide to stay home to visit with the grand kids makes quite a difference as we practice four-part harmony on Tuesday nights!

But the week before last, another woman with an incredible alto voice joined the choir out of the blue. And last week, the janitor joined the bass section.

This janitor has gone out of his way to be near the choir whenever we practice for the last several months. He’d come talk to me while I was prepping for practices or picking out music, and he’d make reasons to do anything that wasn’t vacuuming in the sanctuary while we rehearsed. I’d asked him to join the choir several times, but he always declined saying that he doesn’t read music. He never seemed to believe me when I told him half the choir couldn’t read music. “Naw,” he’d say, “I’d just mess everyone up and slow you all down.”

Well, last week he gave up all pretense of cleaning in the area and just sat in one of the pews listening to practice. And half-way through practice, after much encouragement from me, our pastor (who sings with us), and the rest of the choir, he finally consented to listen to practice while standing with us and holding the music in his hands. He wouldn’t commit to actually singing, but he would hum along.

That didn’t last long. He’s such a quick study that pretty soon he established himself as a key bass voice in my now-augmented choir.

It’s amazing what two more strong voices can do in a choir. Suddenly all the music sounds exponentially better, and every learns their parts faster. I was so pumped after our last rehearsal that I had trouble going to sleep that night! I hope this is the beginning of an expansion trend.

I don’t take many baths. It takes a lot of time to do it properly. You have to think about it for a while, decide whether or not you’ll take a book with you, fill the bath, cool it a little, warm it up again when you cool it too much, spend a few minutes getting in while wondering if the pain is really worth it as you slowly immerse your big toe, millimeter by millimeter. And that’s just the preparations. Then you actually soak for a while. And then you actually have to get out, shivering as the now-cold water evaporates off your goosebumps. Seriously, you have to really want to take a bath for the cost-benefit analysis to come out in your favor.

In the last year and a half, I’ve only taken three baths. The first was the week I moved here, and it was uneventful. The second I’ve already told you about. I still remember the accusation in the voice of Ms. Second Floor as she demanded to know what I was doing up there, and she knows I’m in there because she can hear me moving around. As if I was trying to hide the fact that I lived above her while I also tried to hide the fact that I enjoyed pouring buckets of water all over my floor. She didn’t seem to believe me when I mentioned that I was just taking a bath.

Well, I recently decided to take a bath for the third time since moving here. Long after I’d drained the tub, I was watching the Daily Show when I heard a pounding on my door. That’s right, 10:00 at night, and Ms. Second Floor is pounding on my door. Since she is my building manager now, I decided to open the door even though I thought it was beyond the call of duty.

“You flooded my bathroom again!” She spat (smelling oddly of alcohol, I might add).

I apologized and explained that I’d taken a bath that afternoon.

“Well, I’ve got an inch of water in my tub now, and the whole ceiling is just ruined!”

“I was just taking a bath.” (I didn’t add, “As I should be able to do, since there is a bath tub built into my apartment,” but I thought it.)

“But there’s so much water.”

Seriously, what does she think I was doing up here? In-house slip-n-slide? But I’m so, so bad at confrontation that I just apologized again and suggest that she alert maintenance. Then I spent an evening alternately furious that she would suggest that this was my fault and guilty for having caused her trouble. I explained to myself over and over that I shouldn’t feel guilty. After all, I was using a built-in amenity in the manner in which it was intended to be used.

So the next morning, early enough that I’d be sure to get a machine instead of her, I called the leasing office and suggested (in a frustrated tone of voice) that when she talked to maintenance she should be sure to tell them that this is not a sporadic problem, that it had happened two of the three times I’d taken a bath, and that I’d appreciate knowing when I’d be able to use my bath tub for its intended purpose again. And that’s as far as I can go when defending myself from unstable, dishonest building managers. Sad.

Rewarding people who’ve done well is not a new concept. Rewarding yourself for a job well done is probably a slightly newer concept, but it’s no spring chicken either. Read any column, article, or book on self help, listen to any guru, and you’ll probably be told to make small changes in your life and build in a system of rewards for yourself to keep yourself motivated. (I say “probably” because not only have I not read all the self-help books out there, but I’ve actually never read any of them. But don’t let that small fact prejudice you against my generalization. Oh, and vote for me in 2008.)

So when I started my exercise routine, the trainer suggested I think about ways to make myself stick with it. Some people like to set long-term goals, she told me, while other people need lots of little goals for which they can reward themselves often. Some people like to give themselves shopping sprees or a trip to a spa while others get enough gratification out of the amount of weight they can bench press. The key, she said, is to figure out what motivates you and what would make you most likely to quit, and then try to figure out a motivator that will not only reward you but also thwart your natural inclination to quit anything that’s this time consuming, painful, and generally unpleasant.

In most circumstances I don’t need external gratification, but exercising is not most circumstances. So I’ve built up a whole set of reasons to keep at it. You couldn’t even call this a system. “System” is too singular, too clean, too rational. There’s too much implication of cause and effect. I can imagine a more systematically rewarded person planning to work out three times a week for a month and then buy herself a good book. I can imagine a more systematically rewarded person lifting five more pounds than ever before and then signing up to take a cooking class. Bully for them, I say.

My reward web is nothing like this. Sure, I’ve got more or less theoretical, more or less conventional rewards in store for myself. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ll get a buzz when I up my weights a little. I also know that I’ll enjoy it when my trainer analyses my cardio endurance and finds that I’ve improved. But these are little esoteric for me. Nothing about those experiences would keep me from skipping a brisk walk in negative temps and a frigid wind.

So today, as I thought about the route I would walk and layered socks over my long underwear and scarf over my hat but under my coat collar, I plugged myself into my iPod to listen to the podcast versions of one of my favorite NPR shows. I often miss This American Life when it’s broadcast on Saturdays, but I take the podcast version with me on my walks to ward off the deadly boredom that will surely sap my will to walk. When I’m all caught up on these episodes, an audio book or episodes of Wait Wait Don’t Tell me help to fill the time.

I also put a couple of dollars in my pocket for a hot cup of coffee from the coffee shop that’s directly in the middle of my walking route. Never mind that I make better coffee at home, or that sipping coffee will require that I move my scarf lower on my face and therefore leave more square inches of skin vulnerable to the elements. These are mere technicalities.

Absurd as it may seem, the fact that I’m walking to the coffee shop is all that stands between me and my couch-potato alter-ego. Remember, walking without having a destination translates as “pointless” in my brain no matter how much I try to reason with myself that moving is never pointless. But having a destination, a mission, immediately transforms the whole experience into a treat. I get to go out into the fresh air. I get to take time to listen to my iPod. It’s like magic.

Stop laughing. I never claimed to make sense.