The sleeve grows

I wrote out the numbers of all the increase rows I need to do on the sleeve (so much easier than keeping track as you go, and wondering, "Okay, was I supposed to increase on row 32 or row 34?" as you come to it). I'm about 40 rows in - halfway through the increases - of the first sleeve.

And something I notice happening after busy times is happening again. I get home, think, "Yay, I don't have anything I have to do tonight, I can knit or sew" and then I don't really do very much. (Part of it, with knitting, is that I often watch television while I knit, and wow, has the level of programming, at least evening programming, taken a nosedive in the past months. It's like there are four or five cable channels - TLC, Discovery Fit and Health, Discovery, A and E, and Destination America - that are just interchanging the same reality shows. Reality shows I don't like. (Which is most of them. I liked "Dirty Jobs" but I guess that one's done. And I admit - and this is kind of a guilty-pleasure admission, because it does involve a certain amount of laughing at others' misfortune - to kind of liking "Untold Stories of the ER" (if you watch the show: "Campstove Stuffing" and the naked cactus guy are two examples of others' misfortune). But most of the others, meh. I'm not big on the "hey, let's follow around this extended family and watch them do stuff that seems weird to most of the rest of the nation" or "let's exploit this subculture within America." Or the hoarding shows. Or the shows about people with strange obsessions. I guess people like them because they're still on but they make me twitch a little.)

Anyway. I HAVE been continuing to practice piano, including during times I might otherwise have been knitting or sewing. I've been working a bit on Hanon again (wow, I can feel the burn in my forearms when I play a couple of those exercises, fast. I don't know if it's muscles out of tone - which means it will improve - or that I'm risking messing up a tendon - which means I should let up some). And still working on Beethoven's Sonatina in F. I've got the first part ("Allegro assai") pretty well nailed (and can even play it fast like the directions say). I have part of the Rondo down but there are still parts that defeat me a little, especially when I'm tired.

I've also pulled out the Anna Magdalena pieces and am working on some of them. Though it frustrates me that I can't play them perfectly - they're supposed to be easy pieces! It's rare that I can play something longer than a page or so through without a mistake. I wonder how concert pianists manage - are they just so very much better than I am that they never make mistakes, or are they just better at pretending mistakes don't happen when they do? (I am sure on some recordings they get to do multiple takes, and perhaps even in some cases "good" takes of different movements are spliced together.) Or have they practiced those few pieces so obsessively for so long that they can play them without mistakes? I tend to be more of a dilettante and want to play different things, so it's hard for me to do the laser-focus on a single piece.


***

The person who was out sick is back; I can go get the spray paint now so I know what I will be doing the rest of today - painting bee traps. (Fluorescent yellow, fluorescent blue, and white). One of my colleagues who knows about this stuff counseled me to get an adhesion primer (I think that's what it's called) so the paint will stick better to the plastic.