It's been a while since I've submitted a TRB paper, not least because my (current) job doesn't allow travel to conferences outside the Province. Last year, I had a topic that I thought merited sending in to TRB Innovations but somehow just missed the deadline. This time around I had the makings of a good paper, based on work that is going to be presented at TAC, which is hosted in Ottawa this fall, so technically in Province! But as I dug into it, I realized that there was still quite a bit of work to do, since I hadn't quite cleaned up the data, and it needed a better weighting scheme. Work and life kind of conspired to keep me pretty busy, and I didn't spend as much time in the evenings as I should have. I guess going almost every evening to a Fringe show or a concert at Summer Music 2023 in the first half of July didn't help! As the time to the deadline (Aug. 1 at midnight) ticked away, I then got sick and lost 3 or so days completely, and then there was one weekend my work laptop simply wouldn't start. (The IT guys managed to jumpstart the battery once (and I backed up everything onto an external hard drive and a flashdrive!), but this has kept happening, and they just set me up with a new laptop that I am breaking in. Super annoying.)
I guess five days before the deadline I finally got very serious and said to myself that if I was going to submit a paper, I needed to buckle down. I did a lightning fast lit. review while dropping off a book at Robarts, then turned back to the data. I got the weighting done in a day, then estimated a model to predict the respondents' race and/or ethnicity based on household structural factors and where they lived in the region. I had a functioning model in just a few hours, which was great, but I futzed around with it for a second day (and even now I can see a few more improvements I would like to make). I then applied this new model to synthesize the racial background of all the respondents of a much larger household travel survey. The approach worked roughly as well as expected for looking at trip rates, but the mode choice results weren't quite as robust as I had hoped. In some ways this is a useful finding and will probably lead to some interesting refinements before the TAC conference, but it was a little deflating finding this out on Aug. 1 as I was trying to actually write up the paper -- and make the case for accepting this at TRB. I started wondering if the line of research on essential workers and their mode choices and decisions around teleworking (if that was even an option for them) might not have led to a more compelling story. It was far too late to shift at that point, and I didn't have time to pull in anyone else to help on such a paper, so that will have to wait for another time. So I was actually debating the wisdom of submitting the original paper at all, but I finally decided I might as well put it in, given I had worked so hard (and lost a lot of sleep). I kind of pushed it all together and wrote up some frankly weak conclusions and got it into TRB format. By this point, it was midnight Pacific Time. I think in the end with having to reset my TRB password and deal with the on-line submission process, I went slightly over the limit (but the official limit might actually be three hours later, as it wasn't yet midnight in Hawaii...). I didn't want to risk it, and went ahead and submitted, rather than doing any more last-minute editing. I recall years and years ago, I missed the TRB deadline by only a few minutes and was locked out for the year. That was a bitter lesson. I think back then the deadline was midnight Eastern or Central Time, but I couldn't swear to it. I really could have used another half-day to edit and elaborate one point I made at the end, but it's in. It's not my best work for sure, but it's not bad considering I only fully dedicated a week of real work to it, though the overall approach has been kicking around my mind for some time.
One casualty of this last-minute push was that I had free tickets to Shakespeare in High Park (they are doing Midsummer's Night's Dream yet again), but I had to skip the show. It's a shame, as the weather was actually great. I haven't entirely decided, but I might check it out a bit later in August, even though I would have to pay this time around. On the other hand, the seats in High Park are just so uncomfortable!
I wasn't even able to sleep in much on Aug. 2, as it was still a work day. I actually biked to work and that made me feel a bit better. I probably would barely have gotten out of bed had I worked from home... I had tickets to see the National Youth Orchestra of Canada on their national tour. I decided to go, though I had kind of expected to leave at intermission. As it turned out, the piece I was most intrigued by (K. Smith's Glacial Titan) was going to be after the intermission. I decided to stick around a bit longer and listen to that, and then I stayed for the whole show (including Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition). It was worth sticking it out, as they really played a high-energy version of Pictures that really filled Koerner Hall. Then they did two choir-like encores. (This is something I recall them doing a few years back the last time I saw NYOC on tour.) On some of the stops, they played Morlock's My Name is Amanda Todd. Given the composer's sudden and shocking death earlier this year, I had some hopes they would go ahead and add it to the Toronto concert, but they did not. I have heard the piece a few years back, but think it is worth trying to hear it a second time.
I had really hoped to sleep in a bit and work from home on Thursday, but the laptop wouldn't start up at all, so I had to go in and confer with the IT guys. Again, the bike ride in helped give me a bit of energy to get through the morning. I thought I might check out the Gilgamesh show over at Soulpepper, but it was sold out. I'll see about rush tickets over the weekend. Instead, I went over to The Rex for the early set. It was fun getting back into that, and I'll likely go see the Dave Clark 4 on a couple more Thursdays this month, though I hope that Alison Au makes the other gigs! And maybe I'll check out the group with the Friday early set this month as well. I'm going to try to get back to writing up my urban planning play, if I can track down all the pieces I have written so far.
I then dropped off a couple of books at Robarts and rode home. For once, it wasn't dark when I arrived home. I actually went over to the gym for a super short workout, mostly to get back into the habit and also to try to get under the hot water to try to break up the junk in my lungs (as I am still nowhere near 100% healthy).
Friday I will most likely go swimming, but only go for roughly half my normal routine. Then Sat. I need to get over to the TMU Image Centre, as Sat. is literally the last day to see the spring/summer exhibits. (I nearly missed them, which would have been unfortunate, but I did remember to look at their website just in time.) Then I will see about rushing Gilgamesh, but I'm not going to be completely broken up if I don't see it. I had planned on seeing something at Summerworks, but it turns out it is going to be remounted at Buddies in Bad Times, which is a more logical place to see the show (and certainly vastly easier for me to get to than the Theatre Centre), so that's what I will plan to do. I'll have a post up fairly soon on my picks for the fall/winter theatre season, and I'll go into more details at that time.
I suppose I really ought to try to rest up this weekend and catch up a bit on the sleep I missed out on while getting in this last-minute TRB paper. I need to weed the front lawn, and maybe I can pencil that in for Sunday. Anyway, it's time for sleep.
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