In case you haven’t experienced Door County and can’t imagine that Wisconsin would be a Cape Cod-like destination, here are a few photos to quash that doubt:

I may or may not have gotten a chance to future post some content for the blog, so you may see a week or so of down time.  I’ll try to get to it, but you never know.

If you’re looking for things to read about the bass, luckily there are over 3000 posts.  Feel free to dig through the archives, and I’ll go ahead and post a few “classic posts” here as well over the next week just in case you haven’t seen them before.

Dear ROPA Delegates,
(PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO YOUR ORCHESTRA MUSICIANS)

Sincerely,
Carla Lehmeier-Tatum
ROPA President

Fortunately, living in Hyde Park has put me closer to downtown Chicago, with it’s many options for public transit, and I have worked out my schedule to be able to take the train to and from work most days. It’s kind of a convoluted sequence I go through to get my day going–take the South Shore Metra downtown, hike it across the Loop to Union Station, take the train northwest to Libertyville, and then walk to school. It also takes a lot longer to get to and from where I’m going on the train than it does when I’m driving outside of the rush hour time window–driving takes about an hour, while the train is pushing the two hour mark after transferring and the like.

Despite the lengthy journey via train, I’d pick that form of transportation in a heartbeat over driving. After spending several years driving nearly 50,000 annual miles, getting a chance to finally kick back, study scores, work on my iPad, listen to music, and read while someone else drives me feels like a better use of my time.

I’m having to haul my bass much less these days than I used to, which is sad in a way because it indicates how much less playing I’m doing than I used to do a few years back. Still, my days are spent making music, teaching music, and being creative in the field of music, so I really can’t complain. In fact, I’m substantially happier doing what I’m doing right now than I was as a full-time freelancer.

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows on the train, and I’m getting uncomfortably familiar with trudging through rain, mud, wind, and (soon) snow, as well as twiddling my thumbs and feeling the minutes I have left on Earth melt away as I wait for train after train. Of course, the same thing would be happening to me in the car!

I used to take the Chicago El all the time (and still do when going to DePaul to teach or to go hang out in the city), but the Metra commuter experience is much calmer and more conducive to work, and I am discovering how truly different “train time” is from regular commuting. In fact, I don’t exactly count this train time as commuting time, but rather as scheduled “office” time in which I return emails, study scores, plan classes, and the like. I’m trying to (with rare exceptions) be working 100% of the time while on the train, and I’m finding that, as a result, I don’t have to do much of anything besides relax when I’m home. I actually feel like I have less time in my life when I’m driving, realizing how much stuff I do actually get done while on the train.

Not to be a total Apple fanboy (oh, who am I kidding?), but the iPad is a device that seems built specifically for a person with my setup. I use is as my laptop (I haven’t carried my laptop with me once since getting the iPad), my book reader, movie player, newspaper, portable compendium of scores, articles, and bass parts (thank you, GoodReader!), and my all-purpose musical device for teaching. I use it to teach classes, private lessons, planning clinics, and pretty much everything else. It never runs out of batteries and is small and unobtrusive.

I wish that I could be a rail commuter one hundred percent of the time, but playing bass and having the oddball hours and commutes that I have makes this a dim possibility. Still, I can’t help but feel like I’m doing some small part keeping my car mostly off the road, and it just feels… better, I suppose, to take the train rather than drive.

Jason, my friend has an Element. They are, indeed, great musician cars!

I just bought a 2010 Honda FIT. I bought it because it averages 30 mpg, and because I can fit all my bass stuff in it. Before I bought it, I made the salesman let me take it home and load it up. Have you ever seen one of these cars? They look TINY!!! But they are so well-designed. The seats lay down completely flat with just a flip of a switch.

So, I took the thing home. In the back, I put the following:
My music stand (a big school stand, non-collapseable)
3 microphone stands
my collapseable stool
a 4 by 6 rug
my 3/4 double bass
my Gallien Krueger MB150 amp with matching extension cabinet
a small PA system and mixer

And I still had extra room! Amazing. They are truly amazing little cars, ergonomically well-designed, and the to get 30 MPG avg with that much capacity is something else!

Bob Strickland

Here’s a cool list that reminds me that this adopted home of mine actually isn’t all bad (from TimeOut Chicago, which did a profile on me last year):

Top books about Chicago that aren’t Devil in the White City – http://bit.ly/6VmKPe

My wife, on the other hand, opted for a much more radical career change: from harp performance to pre-med. Like me, she also had bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music, but she went back to school at Northwestern, balancing teaching harp, playing gigs, volunteering at hospitals all over Chicagoland, and working in a research lab with courses like (gulp!) organic chemistry.

How’d it work out? Well, after getting a great MCAT score and getting invited for interviews at prestigious medical schools all over the country, she has started to get a bunch of acceptance letters. The first acceptance to come in was, in fact, our #1 pick: the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine!

I’m pumped for this for so many reasons. For starters, this is one of the top med schools in the country, and it is the place that most resonated with her throughout this interview season. Also, though I won’t mention the exact deal she’s being offered, let’s just say that they’ve put an outstanding package in front of her. Most people going through this process would kill even for an interview from this school (it was the third most selective med school last year, and they’ve cut their class size for this coming year, meaning even fewer available spots), and if they knew the deal she was getting they’d probably faint.

So we’re moving to Hyde Park–Obama’s neighborhood (OK–he’s technically in Kenwood just to the north, but that’s splitting hairs), the home of one of America’s most acclaimed academic institutions, next to Lake Michigan and the Museum of Science and Industry. Will we miss Evanston? Sure…but life keeps moving forward, and We’re both really excited for this change.

Triple Fire Plug: Airline Travel with Your Bass