Operation Carnegie Hall

 A tourist in New York City stops a guy on the street.

"How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"

"Practice, practice, practice," the guy answers.

And so I begin a new effort to improve my piano ability. As you can see from the photo, I have my kitchen timer on the keyboard, set to thirty minutes. When I sit down to play, I hit the timer and it counts down from thirty. If I stop for any reason, I hit the pause. When the timer goes off after thirty minutes, I scratch a hash mark on the calendar for that day. With each hash mark representing a half hour of solid practice, you can see that on my first day I player for ninety minutes, yesterday I played for two hours, and today I've already played for thirty minutes.

  I begin every day playing scales, both forward and contrary when possible. Then I move on to song that I have learned and a new piece I'm working on (Bach Invention # 13). I'm really rusty on some of the songs that I used to play rather well, but it doesn't take too long to relearn them. Note to self: don't allow old pieces to languish for so long.