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Yesterday
The pain in my lower back eased gradually through the course of yesterday. I wasn't aware of it at all while calling square dancing in Baltimore last night, despite sitting for the 45 minute drive each way and standing for most of a two hour stretch during the performance.
This morning, I'm still aware of a minor twinge where there used to be biting pain but that's all. I won't be running any marathons for a while and lifting of heavy objects will be resisted for the next few days, but I think everything is more or less back where it should be without medical intervention. A massage would probably be a good idea, to soothe my currently minor stress if nothing else.
Square dance calling last night went very well, largely for two reasons: (a) I practised at home since I had very little else I could do, and (b) I cheated.
The practice helped to smooth out my issues in timing and to become more intimately familiar with a handful of pieces of music I'm adding to my repertoire. I'm better about starting on key beats, finding my musical cues and remembering accurately the handful of lyric lines for individual pieces.
The cheating is less problematic than it might sound. Dayle has been drilling us on sight resolution for everything and while I can do that pretty well on the patter material, sighting the singing figures without being terribly repetitious has been a problem. Even for the patter, I tend to reuse the same safe get-outs rather than stretching to incorporate new ones.
To patch some of these shortcomings, I've picked out a handful of zero box get-outs, zero line get-outs, singing call figures & bucket stir modules from my notes. I have a single page for each of MS, Plus and A2, three sheets of paper printed in 14 point rather than the 34 pages of material in my collection. I selected each module for smoothness & simplicity --since dancers tend to remember both good get-outs & ghastly ones-- then tested each module to ensure they work as I hoped.
Last night, I premiered two pieces of music freshly added to my repertoire and tried calling with the cheat sheets. I still sight-resolved the patter and to fix some minor dancer issues in the singing calls, but there were a lot more ooooo's and aaaaaah's from the dancers this time than in prior weeks. All of which is good news since I have a half-hour Plus block at Philadelphia's fly-in on Friday.
There must be a suitable mental model for retaining all of this material in my head, but I haven't found it yet. Brute force memorization of this material isn't as effective as it has for other topics. At least I have the upcoming weekend's work covered.
This morning, I'm still aware of a minor twinge where there used to be biting pain but that's all. I won't be running any marathons for a while and lifting of heavy objects will be resisted for the next few days, but I think everything is more or less back where it should be without medical intervention. A massage would probably be a good idea, to soothe my currently minor stress if nothing else.
Square dance calling last night went very well, largely for two reasons: (a) I practised at home since I had very little else I could do, and (b) I cheated.
The practice helped to smooth out my issues in timing and to become more intimately familiar with a handful of pieces of music I'm adding to my repertoire. I'm better about starting on key beats, finding my musical cues and remembering accurately the handful of lyric lines for individual pieces.
The cheating is less problematic than it might sound. Dayle has been drilling us on sight resolution for everything and while I can do that pretty well on the patter material, sighting the singing figures without being terribly repetitious has been a problem. Even for the patter, I tend to reuse the same safe get-outs rather than stretching to incorporate new ones.
To patch some of these shortcomings, I've picked out a handful of zero box get-outs, zero line get-outs, singing call figures & bucket stir modules from my notes. I have a single page for each of MS, Plus and A2, three sheets of paper printed in 14 point rather than the 34 pages of material in my collection. I selected each module for smoothness & simplicity --since dancers tend to remember both good get-outs & ghastly ones-- then tested each module to ensure they work as I hoped.
Last night, I premiered two pieces of music freshly added to my repertoire and tried calling with the cheat sheets. I still sight-resolved the patter and to fix some minor dancer issues in the singing calls, but there were a lot more ooooo's and aaaaaah's from the dancers this time than in prior weeks. All of which is good news since I have a half-hour Plus block at Philadelphia's fly-in on Friday.
There must be a suitable mental model for retaining all of this material in my head, but I haven't found it yet. Brute force memorization of this material isn't as effective as it has for other topics. At least I have the upcoming weekend's work covered.