Trying to do new things

It seems that being sick has allowed my practice habits to waste away to the mere act of warming the bench daily for some scales and/or sight reading. Looking back, I'm unsure about the value sticking to my practice-every-day commitment when I felt so crummy, because i now have an image of practicing as desperately hanging in there while feeling like crap.  I feel like I might have been refreshed by taking a vacation while I was sick -- but really I need to finish out the year of practice-every-day before I judge the value of sticking to it no matter what.

In the meantime, I'm going to go with yesterday's plan and shake things up a bit, trying to do new things, or old things new ways.

Something I'd been completely neglecting was my repertoire maintenance, so yesterday and today I went to back to brush up on some older repertoire, only to discover that my smoothness with it had entirely evaporated. It all seemed familiar enough, but my fingers had lost their coordination. This was unfortunate, because I'd been feeling like playing something easy and just making music -- which is where I used to be with the pieces in question, but sadly, that is no longer the case.

Also to shift things around a bit, I decided that having been playing without looking at the keyboard had been a good exercise, but what I want to start doing instead is to alternate playing while viewing/memorizing the pattern of my hands on the keys, then playing again without looking, but visualizing the keyboard under my hands as I play. The goal is to develop here is a more convincing "inner keyboard", using both my inner eye and my kinesthetic sense. Also, the shifting of states makes me more alert, less likely to get hypnotized by repetition.

Today I also did something which I had been meaning to do for ages, which was to practice playing the melodies of my piano pieces on my pennywhistle. I've actually done it before, but, oddly enough, only when I'm "out in the wild". When I arrive someplace ahead of schedule, I sit with my whistle in the parking lot, and do my bit to keep Portland weird. Because the melodies of my piano pieces often rattle through my head, I had figured them out on my whistle. Yet for whatever reason, I'd never actually practiced them on the whistle at home -- I'd always practice the piano version instead. 

What I discovered is that I really need to do is scales on my whistle. In each of the two major scales available on the whistle, there is an awkward patch of fingering where the lower and upper registers of the instrument's range meet, and it's particularly inconveniently located in the scale I need for my piano melodies. Whenever I go a while without practicing my whistle, this is the first area to fall apart.