(no subject)

still sick. still fairly miserable. Want my breathing apparati back now plz.

(the lung stuff is not actually in my lungs, technically, but it interferes with breathing. and also, therefore, with singing. the sinus stuff mostly doesn't interfere with breathing, except when it does, but it stuffs up my head something fierce and does weird shit to the pressure balance in my inner ear.)

also want my shoulder to stop hurting. want to be doing more knitting (though the Scarf has reached that annoying length where the existing parts make turning back and forth a little unwieldy [but I am not going to try to use this as the opportunity to teach myself backwards knitting/purling] but it's hard to do when my shoulder gets offended after five stitches or so.

also want to stop being exhausted all the time.

(no subject)

I figured out why my shoulder's been whinging a lot lately when I haven't been doing knitting.

So I switched from using physical music to using a pdf on my iPad. It isn't as great for on the fly notations (yes, GoodReader does let you annotate, but, say, if the conductor says "breathe here", if I have physical music and pencil I do a kind of sloppy ... curved checkmark thing that's kind of like the bastard offspring of a v and a } ... which takes a long time to describe but is just a kind of whoosh and on to the next thing; whereas the closest I've managed in GR is to hold down my finger for a second to bring up the menu, tap 'draw...', tap 'line', fudge the ends around until it's a vertical line, and that takes /longer/ to do than to describe; and text annotations are either imprecise freehand-drawn scribbles using my finger or notes that show up as a mini post-it-type flag that you have to tap to see the contents of)

...but it's a hell of a lot better for holding, especially in concert situations where I'm wrangling a black folder that is really not very wrangleable, and a /ton/ better for pageturning. (Plus there's no annoying rustle.)

Anyway. Good situation. Except.

There's sort of this thing (I realized today -- not that I'd thought otherwise before, but it hadn't occurred to me as an issue) where /iPads actually have some weight/.

During rehearsals (not during the performance) I usually have a bag on my lap, holding among other things my water, and I usually hold physical music by the bottom corners and rest the spine against the bag. This makes it possible to handle the music, but it doesn't work for performances because a) no bag on my lap, and b) big hulking black folder that I can't hold well that is larger than the music and also heavier so I can't hold the corners of the music and if I try to hold the corners of the folder that works just fine but I can't hold the music open or turn pages.

With the iPad replacement, yes, the bag was still taking some of the weight. But since the screen has to be pointed at me, I am still half holding it up, or at least maintaining the right angle for it. And I'm doing that mostly with my right hand, since I'm mostly turning pages to the right.

...which means that my arm and shoulder muscles have, not entirely consciously, been on duty during rehearsals.

Of which we have extra this week, since the performance is Sunday.

...yeah.