Commuting and Happiness

I was talking with Joel yesterday on our trip on the 407 out to reherasal in Burlington, and I don't remember if we were talking about commuting and the topic of happiness came up, or if it was the other way around. Anyway, I did a bit surfing today on the combined topic and found this interesting blog post on the Commuter's Paradox. It made me wonder how a few other variable affected the equation:

• Commuting alone or with a spouse or friend
• In terms of the "weighting mistake" her refers to, this must get complicated when one pair of a couple work and commutes and the other stays at home (and works either raising a family or as a "work-from-home" job or consultancy). The weighting functions would be at odds (and yet likely very highly correlated)
• Driving vs. public transit (given similar commute times)

I think I'll need to do more reading to find out how I should feel about my new (less new every day!) commute.

Commuting Threshold

I'm heading to Hamilton after work today, and likely will make the trip completely by transit (as my usual ride (Rob) is working from home today)... I'm expecting close to 3 hours, but we'll see how it goes.

My plan is to leave here at 4:00 (as usual) and get to Union the fastest way I can, the 5:02 trains is probably a bit ambitious, but the 5:34 train is hopefully doable... which will get me into Hamilton (if on schedule) at 6:49. Hopefully there won't be too many "work to Hamilton" type rehearsals.

By the time I return home tonight, I expect I'll have spent just about 5 hours commuting. I've known people for whom this was a regular commuting day... I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it every day.

I'm still trying to figure out what my "regular commuting threshold" is (the point where you decide it's not worth it). Obviously that depends a lot on your job (satisfaction, pay, flexibility), and on the rest of your life (family, friends, housing, extra-curricular activities). What does everyone think their threshold is? What would make them extend it 25% to 50%?

Europe 2010 picures (round 1)

Some pictures are up. We still need to go through the ones from Susanna's camera that will include everything from the eastern Mediterranean to maybe some new ones from Italy, Germany and The Netherlands.

Here is a link

Thanks to Karen, again, for the camera.. photos are much nicer than I would have gotten from my camera.

Markham View

The view of Markham from my desk (over two other rows of desks) does have its charm. While the vista of light industrial warehouses and hydro towers isn't the most beautiful thing in the world, there is something to be said for being able to see a long way. It's a sort of "big sky country" by comparison to our downtown office, where since the building across the street started actually building things above ground, the view had been limited to fire trucks, traffic jams and pedestrians (there are traffic jams to see up here, but not nearly as many of the other two)

Don't get me wrong, I'd still prefer the downtown view (and the location that comes with it), but it's a silver (well, maybe nickel) lining.

"Women's Room"

I suppose it only makes sense. It is called the "Men's room", why wouldn't you call it the "Women's Room", but I'm not sure I've ever seen that anywhere other than my new office. I would have called it (without considering the appropriateness of any answer) called it the "Ladies' room". Upon examination, it does occur to me that we, collectively, no longer refer to that portion of the population as "Ladies" for the most part, unless you are talking about your grandmother's bridge club, or an auxiliary attachment to some long standing "Men's" organization (Lion's, Kiwanis, Loyal Order of Water Buffalo)

Strangely, I would have said "the Women's washroom"... just not "Women's Room". I suppose since we, collectively, have adopted the group noun "Women" in replacement for "Ladies", it makes sense to move to "Women's room" but I've just never seen it before. This new workplace is very progressive!

What are the washroom/bathroom/toiletrooms (a whole 'nother can of worms) where you are called?

The Commute (part 1 of many)

So after 4 days of commuting, I've got a decent idea of what the best route (yes Karen, short of driving myself) will be, and if these times hold up for the winter things could be worse.

So far my morning commutes have been (timed from locking my door to enterring the building):

• 56 minutes (Subway and Steeles Express)
• 46 minutes (Subway and Rob Express via viaduct)
• 51 minutes (Subway and Steeles Express... this was a dream for wait time)
• 37 minutes (Subway and Rob Express via Pape/O'Connor.. and that includes 8 minutes of waiting for Rob, which I can't exactly optimize away, since I'd rather be 5 mintues early than 2 minutes late to not keep Rob waiting)
  

I think the ideal times probably lie somewhere around 35 minutes for Subway/Rob and 50 minutes for Subway/Steeles Bus. I should also point out that all of these involved leaving my place between 6:30 and 6:50 in the morning... I'll find out if this continues to be a tenable solution.

I think if I were to drive myself... the time would probably somewhere around 25-30 minutes, as long as I left at that time, which probably isn't worth the bother... now if I did have a car and drove, I could then return the favour a drive Rob, but he still might need the car to pick up Clare.

As for the afternoon commute.... I haven't been timing it as thoroughly, but mostly I've been heading out with Rob (which allows us to take the High Occupancy Lane (which actually could save 10 or 15 minutes depending on the time we leave)) and getting dropped on a streetcar route on his was to pick up Clare. I think it was about 45 minutes door to door... that still can be optimized a fair bit, I think... need to figure out if the college car or the dundas car (or even the queen car) will be fastest. It won't be as quick as the morning because I can't avoid using surface routes in the afternoon.

I'm back!

After a long hiatus, I might start this up again. Here are some of the things I might be writing about:

• Susanna and I are just back from a long trip to Europe, so I'll have a bunch of photos to link from here once I get them all off the camera which Karen most generously loaned to me for the trip.
• My office has officially moved to almost-Markham (south side of Steeles, east of the 404), so I'm still trying to figure out my commute. Suggestions are welcome!
  
• Some of my usual rants on obviously unimportant things.

Anyway, we'll see if this round of blogging lasts!

California Photos

Here are the photos that I've posted from our trip to California.

Anameim Results

As many of my readers may know already, I've now returned from my trip to California which was partly pleasure and partly barbershop (just kidding... that's pleasure too).

My Quartet, "Chameleon" finished a respectable 37th place scoring our highest overall score ever (and best overall position). If the individual category scores are to be believed, we are pretty good musicians, mediocre singers and piss-poor presenters (I exaggerate at both ends!). I'm also pretty lucky to join a small group of singers who have sung in the international quartet contest on two parts now (bari last year, lead this year), and I believe that I have the current longest running international competitor streak, at 12 years(which includes 10 years as a chorus competitor, one year where I was just a college competitor, and last year where I was just a "regular" quartet competitor)... woohoo!

The chorus (TNL) after a year off returned to the international stage and placed a respectable 5th place (the competition is getting much more difficult).

On the whole, the international convention was good fun. I'll post links to some of my California pictures when I find the time to sift through them (which should be soon, as I'll be a lonely bachelor for a three weeks after Susanna leaves for Taiwan tomorrow night).

Seen in California

On a sign in a window in a desert zoo: "Cold Beer, Ice cream".

On another sign in the same window "Closed for summer"

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.

Scotland

Sorry for the long absence... May was "no blogging month", right?

I spent the last week in May in the UK on vacation. I was there for two singing engagements with the Northern Lights that fell on two successive weekends, and the week in between was spent driving up to and around Scotland with my friends David and Jordan. The singing stuff went really well, it's always an amazing experience to sing for such an appreciative audience.

I didn't take any pictures of the singing events, but i do have pictures of the trip to Scotland.

Elevator fun

Susanna and I were heading up to our apartment from the garage last night, but realized after already having pressed "10", that we needed to get the mail, so we pressed "L" and got out at the lobby, where someone got into our elevator as we got out. We got our mail fairly quickly and didn't wait long in the lobby for another elevator to take us to 10. When we got to 10, the same guy got in the elevator as we got out! He must not have realized that 10 had already been pressed, and automatically got out when the elevator stopped only to find out that he was on the wrong floor probably only after the elevator doors had closed and it had zipped away to his floor.

When we passed him as we were getting out of the elevator on 10 he probably would have recognized us as the cause of his problem (it was late and there weren't many people around), but we made it safely to our door.

-KDH

Nashville Bound!

I was outted by Karen on her 'blog, so I guess I'd better post here... it's been a long time.

This past weekend my quartet,"Chameleon", qualified to represent Ontario District at the international convention in Nashville, TN this coming July. It's pretty exciting and will me more than a little nerve wracking. I've sung in front of 10,000 people before at these contests, but always with the safety net of a chorus behind me and 8 or 10 other guys singing the same notes that I am singing. This year will be different: I'll be the only person singing my part... and I'll be one of four on stage, not one of 40.

The experience of going to "internationals" will be different on a couple of other fronts too. First, my chorus (TNL) is not going this year (as we decided to take a year off and we are going to the British Association of Barbershoppers' annual convention, in the U.K.). It will be strange not competing in the chorus competition, and not having rehearsals all through the week... it will be strange, but nice! Besides the extra free time, it will be strange not having a whole bunch of guys (and their families) to hang out with all week. Another chorus from Ontario (the Capital City Chorus from Ottawa) will be going, and they are good friends of our quartet, but it's still not quite the same.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about the opportunity to sing at internationals... should be fun.

-KDH