Slow and Steady Progress

I'm so tired but I've got some AMP juice to get me going...

I've been limping around since Saturday afternoon, trying to avoid putting weight on my left leg. The knee has been painful ever since the fall I took while ice-skating. That coach! He promised he'd catch me before I slip but he didn't. When I slipped, I landed on my left knee with my left leg twisted behind me and my right in front of me. Not a natural position for the body of course.

I don't think anything is broken because there is no major swelling in the area but everytime I try to straighten or bend the leg, my knee feels like it's going to snap sideways. I can't hear a popping sound so I don't have a dislocated knee which is already extremely good news to me as a ballet student. But I can't do retires (essential for pirouettes) and degages. The doctor told me to rest the leg as much as possible and if it still hurts by Wednesday then I should have an orthopedic surgeon look into the matter. Well, it's Tuesday night and I'm still having problems with the knee. I guess it's off to find a doctor tomorrow. Hopefully it's nothing serious...or expensive.

My grandmother has a lot of lesions and bruises on her legs and they've been getting worse. My mother, who can pass off as a doctor sometimes, says that this is a symptom of diabetes or leukemia. So my Lola is going to have a check up and blood test tomorrow. Hopefully nothing serious is going on in her body too.

Things are hectic so posts might be getting rarer or a lot shorter in the weeks to come. I leave you with a recommendation to check out pandora.com, a site by the Music Genome Project. You give them an artist or song and they will give you similar music based on an unbiased analysis of some 200 musical parameters. It's been a great way for me to discover more artists who play the music I like and I now have five radio channels that play exactly what I want. It's pretty cool. To cite from a New York Times article on the project:

Bit by bit, Pandora’s music analysts have built a massive
archive of data, cataloging the minute characteristics of
more than 500,000 songs, from alt-country to bossa nova
to metal to gospel, for what is known as the Music Genome
Project.

At pandora.com visitors are invited to enter the name of their
favorite artist or song and to get in return a stream of music
with similar “DNA,” in effect a private Internet radio station
microtailored to each user’s tastes.

Pandora’s innovation is to focus on the formal elements of songs,
rather than their popular appeal. Say your favorite song is Aretha
Franklin’s recording of “Respect.” Pandora will make you a
personalized soundtrack that could include Gladys Knight and the
Pips’ “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” and Solomon Burke’s
“Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” (Why? Click twice and learn
that Pandora thinks the Gladys Knight tune resembles “Respect”
because it includes “classic soul qualities, blues influences, acoustic
rhythm piano, call and answer vocal harmony and extensive vamping.”)

It may not take 21st-century technology to deduce a link between
Ms. Franklin and Ms. Knight. But the more you tell Pandora about
your tastes, the more creative it can get.