The hazards of practicing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I've done it:  I've injured myself by being responsible.

Let me go ahead and say that I practiced piano this morning.  I had done a sufficient amount of practicing.  Yet this afternoon, I said, "Oh, I'll be ultra good and practice for another hour or so."  I ignored the fact that I was too sleepy to get much done, and decided to practice a little longer before taking a nap.  I pulled out this semester's most difficult piece and got to work.  I got to the very end:  an accented staccato 8th note, in this case the lowest note on the piano, played fortissimo.  It might as well say "Please hit the shit out of this note" above it.  I was enthusiastic.  I came down hard.  My finger was ready to deal some musical pain.

Except I hit the note and somehow, with the tiniest bit of excessive fingernail that I have going on right now, I managed to catch a little piece of the wood of the old Steinway.  I felt something surprising and unpleasant, looked, and noted the enormous splinter of wood sticking about a third of the way up under my fingernail.

It didn't hurt, but SWEET MERCY that image frightened the crap out of me.  I quickly removed it before my brain had time to process the picture and decide, "This is probably terribly painful; let's explore that."  I left a note in the piano technician's box re: VERY DANGEROUS AND SCARY WOOD FRAGMENTS, and looked for another pianist to empathize with my gross-looking nail bed, but was unsuccessful.  So I called my mommy and whined to her instead.

We'll see how this works out--I'm going to be very frustrated if I wake up tomorrow with a ring finger that's too sore to practice or type.