On Having Attained the 2.5-yr Mark

So I admit to being 3 weeks late on this, but this is still close enough. 

I've been doing this non-stop for two and a half years. It seems unreal. Almost as though no time has passed since then, though I remember lots of days of sitting at the piano.

What can I do now that I couldn't do before? Today I noticed a... gap?... in my scales. I was playing at a certain pace, and literally felt a lot of slack in the technique that marked the capacity to speed up and still maintain the integrity of the scales. Now, I've been practising scales and arpeggios religiously since September 2015--so about a year and 8 months--without really seeing much of a difference beyond simply learning more of them (with a million more to go!) and playing them a bit more fluidly. So I think what happened (finally!) is the kind of thing orthodontists see all the time. The braces have done their disciplinary work, but now, in order to continue that work, they must be tightened. I tightened my C minor (harmonic), D major, and D minor (harmonic) scales today. Yay!

And the discipline continues...

Otherwise, I'm still sorta working on Kabalevsky's Etude in D. It's still hard, but I have to believe it's getting there even though I trip over the same technical bits every single time. And I've learned (though not quite polished) Karganov's Dance of the Elves. It is very fun to play and I like it very much. I even started playing it at a higher speed today and it wasn't so bad at all. I've also begun learning Little Bird by Edvard Grieg. It requires a lot of left-hand work, which I appreciate very much. And it has been giving me a good work out. I recall that last week it was nearly impossible to play those trill-ish 32nd notes (which I played as though they were 16ths to begin). Now I can actually play them right at least 80% of the time--maybe more. I recall yesterday while playing them marvelling that they could have been so difficult before. So I would have to say that's measurable progress, though my hands still feel far from capable. 

I also felt my ability to play that inverted E-major scale passage (extracted as a technical exercise from Chopin's Nocturne in C# minor) improve in the past couple days. I went from discouraged frozen-hands one day to noticeably-more-fluid loose hands the next. They weren't kidding about the darkest part of night being just before dawn, were they? 

(Also been having the flu for the past 5 days or so, and I neglected to practise for more than about 15 minutes yesterday because of the illness. I'm surprised I haven't missed more.)

There ought to be much more to say. It's been so long. I'd been planning on learning Bach's Prelude in C (from WTC) with just the left hand. It was coming along pretty well, too! But I haven't touched that in a couple weeks... not since Orlando and Disney World.

I'm still doing the daily sight reading. Right now I'm reading some late-beginner Christmas tunes, which is pretty fun since I (as the rest of the world) love Christmas songs. Yesterday when looking at the score to Liszt's Six Consolations while it played on YouTube, I found that the text didn't look quite so vertiginous and, in fact, seemed almost readable. So I'll just keep doing that and hope that eventually all the moving parts will coalesce. I'll do that with the rest of my piano regimen as well.

Just. Keep. Moving.