So Laura and I joined a bowling league a couple of weeks ago, almost without meaning to. Some friends of ours from our occasional trivia league have been in a low-key league for the past decade, and they invited us to come bowl with them on the most recent monthly outing. The lanes aren't far at all from our apartment, and we both love to bowl, so we said sure.

The lanes, on the second floor over a store, turned out to be so old and divey that they didn't even have automatic scoring machines. The bar was a place where even non-bowlers came to hang out. Laura and I ended up bowling on a team with a couple of very nice guys whose teammates are apparently not very reliable. (Also, I ran into the owner of a local pet-supply store where I shop, who is also in the league.) We had a great time, and we both bowled well enough (not a terribly high bar) that the two guys invited us to be on their team permanently.

We accepted. Duh.

A few days later, Laura saw an ad for an upcoming Neil Diamond concert. Knowing her mother used to like Neil Diamond, Laura called her up and asked if she might be interested in going to the concert together.

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!" cackled Laura's mother. "First you two join a bowling league, and now you want to go see Neil Diamond. You are officially old!"

Let that one sink in for a minute. We're being mercilessly teased by a 68-year-old woman for being old.

But we're not really old. We're just drawn that way.

So Laura and I went back to see our bowling-champion accountant last night to pick up our taxes. He met us rushing back from dinner at a neighborhood Italian place down the avenue. The news was so good that we went straight over to a bar called Dillinger's for celebratory beer and wings.

Of course, good news is relative, and in this case means the news was not nearly as bad as we feared it would be. We may still be able to afford to move to Chicago and go to Worldcon in Yokohama.

And of course, even if the news had been truly bad, we still would have gone to Dillinger's for consolatory beer and wings. They just wouldn't have tasted quite as good as the celebratory ones.

Laura and I went to our new accountant last night for some desperately needed good news about our taxes. His office wall is loaded with bowling trophies and plaques. Two of the plaques commemorated "11 in a Row" achievements. The scorecards were reproduced. The one I could read had a spare in the first frame followed by 11 strikes, for a score of 290. (The only other way 11 strikes in a row could have been scored would be 11 strikes followed by nine or fewer pins in the third ball of the 10th frame, which also would have given him a higher score than 290—assuming, of course, that he didn't gutter the ball. But I digress.)

It may be completely irrational, but this helped me feel that our taxes were in good hands.