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Hand Pain

My plan for today was to post about my scales breakthrough. I've actually already written the post; the only thing missing is the videos to demonstrate how fabulously I'm playing the D major and B harmonic minor scales.

Alas, yesterday at work, I was having a lot of hand pain while typing. This happens on a semi-regular basis, and it's weird--I don't have (or I don't notice) any hand pain at the piano, but at times it's almost impossible to type at work because of the aching in the back of my right hand, mainly from just above the middle of my wrist up to the bases of my fingers.

Last night I sat down to practice, and ... it wasn't happening. At least not to the degree I'd planned. I ended up doing a good bit of left-hand work on the "Mad Chase" section of Chopin, as well as some review/repetition on the stride section of Bare Necessities ... and that was it. I wasn't going to touch Maple Leaf or the Bare Necessities ragtime section with my hand feeling like it did.

(I worked pretty hard on the first page of the Bare Necessities ragtime "A" Tuesday night, so I'm kind of wondering if that contributed to the problem. It requires a lot of hand-stretching, and maybe I shouldn't have gone at it so hard for my very first practice of this new section.)

Anyway, instead of practicing piano, I poured myself a glass of wine, iced my hand, and watched "Devil at the Crossroads," a Netflix documentary on Robert Johnson, while sitting under a mountain of cats.

It wasn't a bad evening after all.

My hand still feels a little achy this morning, so I'm going to try to limit my keyboard time at work and do some hard-copy editing that I've been needing to do. And hopefully, I'll be back at the piano this evening.

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