This weekend was a nice relaxing catch-up-on-backlog weekend; I'm still walking slowly through mine, but it feels good. I may also have found a reason to learn how to knit. Well, two. Behold: Captain Capacitor and Resisty the Resistor.

Spent the day occasionally learning bits of "In My Life" in fingerstyle guitar. The arrangement is from a library book, but I'm modifying them to sound more "right" (to me) and stretch my (small) hands less painfully. So far I can crawl through the intro and everything except the last few bars of the verse; the bridge will be a challenge. I'm committing everything to memory immediately, as opposed to the piano, where I sightread everything and therefore find myself severely limited without a songbook. I'm also doing my practicing in spurts for the same reason I do Rachmaninoff in spurts; my hands can only stretch so far for so long.

Friday (or maybe Saturday morning) will be a good test of my recent musical adventures; I've found myself in the role of rhythm section (keyboard and/or guitar, although I'll probably stick with my comfort zone and play the former) for a musical jam (blues!) at DJ and Ginneh's place up in Malden. DJ is a bassist and a bass and Ginneh is a cellist and an alto - I decline to inflict my singing on anyone, but should also (literally) have my hands full with whatever instrument-that-plays-chords I am playing for whatever songs we attempt. It's been a long time since I played with other people, and I'm looking forward to it.

Last night I actually acted sort of like a normal 23-year-old and went out drinking with some friends from college. Pizza, beer, conversations about Drupal (...okay, I said "sort of normal") and a giant plate of nachos. Far more nachos and pizza than beer for me; I tend to drink relatively infrequently and in comparatively small quantities because the thing I like about beer is the taste and how it interplays with food (the actual sensation of inebriation is displeasing to me, so I stop after a drink or two).

Ergonomics: I don't have a great system yet, but now that I have my large monitor back from Nikki, I will try that out tomorrow morning while working from home. Large monitor + nice speaker set + keyboard = not that bad, really. I still need to try the "portable music stand as portable typing tray" idea; I wonder who I can borrow a music stand from to test this out without having to plonk down $$ for Yet Another Thing To Own before I know it works.

It's time well spent at the end of the day when I take a few minutes to drink some hot tea and plan out the next day. I have a tendency, otherwise, to do a lot of stuff during the day, but not necessarily accomplish anything particularly definite - which is... not terrible, but... not the best I could do, certainly. I'm also learning that I need a whiteboard (ideal) or a sheet of paper (when not by a whiteboard) for my daily to-do list; my notebook or a text document on the computer work, but not as well. I need the Large Physical Object Constantly Within My Field Of Vision to remind me to context-switch back to where I will be most productive at any given time.

And on that note, I'm going to turn off my computer now, and whiteboard out tomorrow with a cup of nice hot tea. And then I'm going to bed.