Day 18 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge...is postponed until tomorrow. And day 19 will be late as well. (Good thing I have Sunday off!)
But hey, if you find yourself near Uptown Underground tonight and want to contribute to an excellent chorus, come on in!
Two weeks ago I started writing my A-to-Z posts and got all the way to today's before my life became nuts—as I knew it would—with 4 chorus-related events and a huge increase in my work responsibilities. And with the Apollo After Hours benefit this coming Friday, this weekend will be pretty full as well.
I use my email inbox as a to-do list, and right now it has 35 messages, 30 of which relate to the benefit. I'm very glad the A-to-Z Challenge gives us Sundays off, because I don't know how I'm going to get another week ahead by tomorrow night.
The performances were worth it, though.
Yesterday Parker got fitted for a new E-collar after I discovered that his long nose and long tongue were just long enough to lick his sutures. Fortunately the incision doesn't seem irritated or infected, probably owing to the massive doses of antibiotics we've got him on.
As for the primary injury, that seems to have healed remarkably well in the few days since his surgery. He's putting more weight on the leg, and has less trouble standing up. He still seems a little shaky in some postures, particularly squatting.
So Parker's biggest problems right now are bumping into things with his Cone of Shame, and the abject boredom of a smart dog getting only 15 minutes of walkies a day.
He's really going to hate this coming week, too. I've got rehearsals or performances every single evening, so he'll be alone most of the time. Poor dude.
(There is no A-to-Z post today because it's Sunday.)
In the last seven days, these things have happened:
Meanwhile:
Can't wait to see what the next week will bring...
The Apollo Chorus of Chicago are performing Verdi's Requiem at the Holy Family Church, 1080 W. Roosevelt Rd., tonight at 7:30.
Tickets are $40 at the door, and well worth it.
Yesterday I did, in fact, hit 25,000 steps. I ended the day with 28,828. I considered going for one more 15-minute walk to hit 30,000, but decided I'd had enough for the day, and went to bed—and got 7½ hours of sleep.
This morning it was once again clear and crisp (but above freezing), so I walked to work, just over 6 km and one hour of walking, and about 7,000 steps. So at 11am, I've already got 9,200. With a forecast 11°C and an Apollo Chorus rehearsal 5 km away, I might hit 20,000 again today.
Tomorrow's forecast looks even better for walking. Wednesday looks OK, too. And then it will rain all day Thursday. Still, I'm confident of making a pretty good showing in a Fitbit challenge going on this week.
And as we have just a two more days of meteorological winter, I'm also ever more confident that January 1st will remain the coldest day of 2018. (We'll see what happens in late December.)
And with that, I'm off to Starbucks, and probably 10,000 steps before noon.
Yesterday started with a performance on local television and ended with a three-hour rehearsal and midnight showing of Star Wars. I'd already planned to go into work late today, but Parker didn't eat dinner last night and he refused breakfast this morning, so I'm waiting to see if I can get him to the vet.
With that and other things up for grabs today, plus two more performances this weekend, posting might suffer a bit.
I'm on the Board of Directors for the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, and information technology is my portfolio. Under that aegis, I'm in the process of taking all of our donor and membership spreadsheets and stuffing them into a new Neon CRM setup.
So far, it's going well, and it's going to make the organization a lot more effective at managing membership, events, and donations.
That said, in the last 24 hours I've logged five bug reports, including one of the most frustrating user experience (UX) bugs possible: a broken back button. This UX failure is so well-known and so irritating that we were talking about it when I started developing Web apps in the late 1990s. Jakob Nielsen called it the #1 web design mistake...of 1999:
The Back button is the lifeline of the web user and the second-most-used navigation feature (after following hypertext links). Users happily know that they can try anything on the web and always be saved by a click or two on Back to return them to familiar territory.
Except, of course, for those sites that break Back by committing one of these design sins:
- opening a new browser window (see mistake #2)
- using an immediate redirect: every time the user clicks Back, the browser returns to a page that bounces the user forward to the undesired location
- prevents caching such that the Back navigation requires a fresh trip to the server; all hypertext navigation should be sub-second and this goes double for backtracking
Neon, however, has made some alternative design choices, and even has a FAQ explaining how they've broken the rules.
Seriously, guys. It's a good product, but wow, is that irritating.
If you're in the Chicago area, today is your last chance to see the Apollo Chorus "American Masters" concert.
We're performing Jeff Beal's "Salvage Men," with Beal himself in attendance (and playing flugelhorn on his "Poor in Sprit" later in the concert). Tickets are still available, $35 at the door ($15 for students), this afternoon at 3pm at Alice Millar Chapel in Evanston.
Things to read today:
And finally, the Chicago Tribune has an article on our concert this weekend, and composer Jeff Beal performing in it:
"I suppose it might have been DNA asserting itself," said Beal, who will be in Chicago May 5 and Evanston May 7 when the celebrated Apollo Chorus includes his "The Salvage Men" and "Poor in Spirit" as part of their 145th-season-ending spring concert, "American Masters," in Chicago and Evanston. "It's true that [my grandmother] passed on her love of improvisation, but there's also something almost eerily similar about what she did, watching a screen and creating her own musical accompaniment, and what I do in my day job."
[H]e had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. Though he took seven years to process the news before beginning to write "The Salvage Men" in 2014.
Serendipitously, that was about the time that Apollo Chorus music director Stephen Alltop, who studied with Beal at Eastman, got back in touch to praise Beal's work on" House of Cards" and suggest the possibility of doing a concert together. Which explains why Beal and his new choral works are appearing in Chicago directly after their debuts in London and Los Angeles. Beal also will perform solo trumpet over the comparatively simple text of his "Poor in Spirit," — it consists entirely of one repeated phrase from the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit" — much as he often plays trumpet over the score of "House of Cards."
Tickets are available through the Apollo Chorus website. It's going to be an amazing concert.