One more quick note: despite the cold and rain (and traffic), three of us had dinner last night at The Oval Room in the District. Fantastic. We all would recommend it.
After dinner we walked two blocks to my friend Barry's house:
We didn't knock on the door, but one of my colleagues swears someone waved to her from the North Portico.
I may have more time later today. Maybe.
Back to work.
At the beginning of 2014, I took a look at some of my personal numbers in the preceding year. I also predicted I'd travel more. Well, here's the update:
- To last year's 9 trips, this year I took 26 and flew 49 segments, visiting 11 states and 5 countries*. All but the number of states visited is a new record. (I visited 36 states in 1991. That will be tough to beat, ever.)
- I flew 122,776 km, also a new record.
- The Daily Parker had 512 posts, so the daily mean dropped to 1.40, a slight decline from 2012 and 2013.
- I worked 2,112 chargeable hours, which includes vacation, PTO, and holidays. But in my timekeeping system I logged 2,965, which includes a number of other activities that took away free time but were not necessarily work-related (including 138 hours walking Parker).
- I started 31 books and finished 25. (A few were put away for later reference.) Of them, I'd make the strongest recommendations for Kevin Hearne's Hounded and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
- I also attended the theater a lot more than last year, but not enough to write home about.
In 2015, I expect much less travel, about the same number of Daily Parker posts, possibly more books, and possibly more live performances.
* Sint Maarten, Canada, the UK, France, Norway; New York, California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Arizona, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Louisiana.
Just passing through Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters after a mini-vacation for the new year...and realizing I haven't posted anything since 2014.
Tomorrow I'll have 2014 end-of-year stats, and possibly one or two other ideas from the 143 unread emails I have in various Outlook folders.
Vacation. It always makes me a little crazy. I need stuff to do. And even though the temperature has plummeted to -12°C overnight, that means going outside and not sitting at my computer.
When Parker and I get too cold, I'll start reading these articles:
And because my (irritated) Euchre coach demands it, I'll review (one more time) Harvey Lapp's Ten Commandments of Euchre.
While we're getting ready to celebrate the birth of Baby X this Xmas, links are once again stacking up in my inbox. Like these:
That might be it for The Daily Parker today.
A friend upgraded my wardrobe. Specifically, I received a real bow tie for my concert tuxedo to replace my ugly clip-on. I am grateful; the clip-on was really ugly.
However, the friend may not have realized that I have never tied a bow tie before. And so, last Saturday before our Messiah concert at the Harris Theater, I attempted to learn:
Fortunately, one of the other singers helped me out before we went on, so the end result didn't suck too badly:
Unfortunately, I had to take it off after the concert. That means I'll have to learn how to do it all over again—I hope before our next concert in March.
I missed this a couple days ago. The Sun-Times stopped by during an Apollo Chorus rehearsal just after Thanksgiving and published a feature on us on the 13th:
Well, Chicago’s Apollo Chorus is that type of choir. The members can sing old classics, modern classics and even new standards, and have performed with everyone from Josh Groban to Jackie Evancho. And since December is the holiday season, the chorus — Chicago’s oldest, having been founded in 1872, just after the Chicago Fire — is in full swing.
Led by music director and conductor Stephen Alltop, also a professor at Northwestern University, the chorus’ 120 members perform Handel’s seminary holiday piece in a unique way — without written music.
“It has a very similar flow to an opera, and we try to emphasis dramatic elements of the piece,” says Alltop, when asked how to keep the piece “fresh” after over a century of performances. “To make the best possible connection to the audience, the chorus performs a majority of ‘Messiah’ by heart. And that’s pretty unusual in that it takes a lot of training and preparation to be able to do that. You can get more eye contact, and there’s something that in a way goes beyond what we can describe about how wonderful that is.”
Our sold-out performance on Saturday went very well. We made a few mistakes—the kind only the chorus and Stephen knew about—and we got tremendous recognition from the audience. Plus, with the Messiah, everyone really does go out humming the tunes.
Here's video the Sun-Times took of our rehearsal:
Andrew Sullivan, the most frequent guest during the entire run of the Colbert Report, has kind things to say:
This was an unprecedentedly sustained act of character improvisation. I wasn’t crazy to doubt he would pull it off. I just didn’t realize how deeply brilliant and able he is. No one interviewed a politician as freshly as he did, or took down a pretentious author with more finesse. His writers were and are the best on television – deeply read, darkly funny. His professionalism was staggering. Nothing was ever phoned in – night after night. I saw him meticulously prepare performances, tweaking props, finessing green screens, hitting every note (he re-taped his final song before we left the studio that night), and almost never flubbing a line – while making sure to compliment you if you got yours right.
I also have to say Colbert remains a Catholic role model for me – a deeply humane and kind man, a generous soul, someone so totally at peace with this modern cacophony, and yet also committed to a way of life that could not be more opposed to it. For so many who regard our faith as a cramped anachronism, he was a real beacon of what a modern Catholic can be: open, funny, decent, humble. He helped keep my faith alive in a dark decade. And made me laugh at the same time. Of whom else on television could I say such a thing?
Major announcement coming this afternoon. While prepping for that, however, I have cued up more things to read and one to watch:
And I found this classic Margo Guryan tune from 1968 that I can't get out of my head: