Early to bed...

Last night I collapsed on the couch around 9pm, to be stirred at around midnight to go to bed... where I promptly fell asleep until almost 7 this morning.

I can't remember the last time I went to bed before 10 or maybe even 11. I was tired.

The smell of impending summer

I smelled it about a week ago for the first time and meant to blog about it, and smelled it again last night and this time have remember to blog about it.

Grass! (no, not that kind of grass) To be specific, the smell of a freshly mowed lawn is, for me, a smell of summer.

Anaheim Bound!

We did it again! Chameleon qualified for the international quartet contest again, and are planning to sing at the convention in early July. We had one major change this year... we switched parts earlier this year, and I'm back to lead and Dave is singing baritone. We made the change a couple months ago for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the big ones is that each of us is back to what is probably our more natural part.

I think we scored a 76.8% which is a bit lower than last year (both our qualifying score and our score in Nashville) which I was pretty surprised with (pleasantly surprised). Things seemed to come together in the last two and a half weeks... if you had asked me if we had a chance to qualify then, I'd have said no way.

It does feel a little different qualifying as a lead versus a baritone, like I'm not riding on any coattails. While I'm sure my quartet mates would say I wasn't, because I stepped into a hole in an already successful quartet, it felt that way a bit. With the part switch, it feels like a bit of new quartet, and I feel like there is more responsibility associated with being the lead singer in the quartet.

The convention was a great one, with a very deep Saturday night contest (7 Ontario quartets scored over 70% and there was one out of district quartet ("Big Time!") that scored a 79-ish). I do realize that the numbers will mean little to most of the people who read this... but 70% is pretty decent.

Another kinda cool thing that happened was that we had a post-contest session with one of the judges who remembered my college quartet from 9 years ago... and, in fact, he remember one of our songs and referred to it as our "hallmark song"... I didn't think we were 'famous' enough to have a hallmark song!

p.s. I know it's been a while... who knows if I'll start posting more often.

Dr. Horrible is fantastic!

Thanks to my friend Sharky (not his real name), I stumbled across a totally awesome musical/comedy/comic book style online mini-series called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". I have addicted to it: I've had it running in the background at work all day long. Anyway, I gotta get back to listening to it! Here's a link.

A couple notes: it's not really for kids (even though it sounds like it might be), and Kristin (yes of kristininberlin fame) tells me you can't use the link outside the U.S. (although,I'm outside the U.S.... I suppose it's probably the usual confusion of all of North America as the U.S.)

Elevator Etiquette

The other day I got in the elevator after locking my bike up on P1, there was already someone in the elevator who has pressed their floor (I think it was 4), so as usual, I pressed my floor (higher than 4) , the doors closed and we were merrily on our way. We got to the 4th floor, the doors open... and no one moves. I sort of glanced over at her in a "I'm not leering" kind of way, but got no reaction. The doors close, at which point I assume that she's forgotten something in her car and needs to head back down to get it, so she's just going to stay in the elevator and go back down. But just as the doors are opening at my floor, I see her snap back to coherence and press 4 again.

Should I have alerted her that 4, the button she pressed, was probably where she wanted to get off while the doors were open? Should I have coughed to get her attention? Or should I have just assumed she knew what she was doing (as I did)?

-kdh

How to waste a day 20 minutes at a time

Warning: don't follow this link unless you have some time to waste: ted.com. I don't remember how I ran across this site, but I know that I had seen it before without exploring the whole site. Basically, the site is a collection of talks and performances taken from a conference that brings together 'experts' from the worlds of "Technology, Entertainment, Design", although I think it covers more than just those categories.

I particularly like watching the talks that cover the areas where have an innate interest in the subject (admittedly, it's often anything to do with numbers or the environment), but I haven't really run across any that I didn't find fascinating.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

• Benjamin Zander talks about music and passion.
• Hans Rosling plays with world statistics in a really cool way
• Erin McKean (a lexicographer) talks about the history and future of the dictionary
  

-kdh

44th!!!

Well, we've returned from Nashville where my quartet finished 44th. We were pretty happy with out performance although we were singing in a pretty tough spot, first out of the gate in between previous champs "Realtime" and this year's eventual winner "O.C. Times". As for the scores (76.9%), I think we had hoped they would be a little bit higher, but we're not really worried about them all that much.

I always find internationals has a strange ambivalent effect on me. On one hand, watching great quartets is inspiring and motivates me to get better at this hobby. On the other hand, I watch the top 10 (or even top 20) quartets and think that I'll never be that good, no matter how hard I work. Oh well, such is life, I guess.