hahaha Opening jars (and eating contents!) is definitely safer than ironing. I iron about once a year, so i'm with you and will be using hand safety as my latest and best excuse.

Lawnmowing; my neighbour works in casualty/emergency and says that they get significant number of lawnmower-finger injuries. Never put your hands near the workings unless it is off (and unplugged). And I love running in the bush, glad to hear it's good for my playing.

Sports: avoid basketball. I jammed and 75% dislocated a finger in high school and now have arthritis in that joint.

Additionally, never use your hands as a hammer.

If you plan to make money using your hands, be careful using them.

I wound up with an overuse injury of my finger this summer from opening pull top cat food cans. Our cat was eating up to four cans of food a day and several months of opening all of those cans really took a toll on my finger and my hand also. It took me a while to figure why my hand hurt so much. I now use a spoon like a lever to pull off the tops of the cans and my hand has healed up just fine. I am careful with all pull top cans now.

Indeed. Growing up, I knew a farmer who had lost all but one finger of one of his hands to a farm implement - I think it was a combine feeder. What was left of his hand was pretty ugly. And it was really sad to watch him using that remaining finger, struggling to do things the rest of us take for granted. It served as a very strong warning to me at the time, I can tell you that.

xtraheat,

I don't wish to hijack your thread as you clearly have talent. My knuckle cracking comment was meant as a comment to your approach to playing.

Here's what Johns Hopkins arthritis center has to say about knuckle cracking:

http://www.hopkins-arthritis.org/arthritis-news/2007/knuckle-cracking-and-arthritis.html

"There is no evidence that cracking knuckles causes any damage such as arthritis in the joints. However, a couple of reports in the medical literature are available associating knuckle cracking with injury of the ligaments surrounding the joint or dislocation of the tendons ( attachments of muscles to bones) which improved with conservative treatment. A study found that after many years of cracking habitual knuckle crackers may have reduced grip strength compared with people not cracking their knuckles."

I'm sorry if I hijacked your thread. Maybe we could get back to analyzing xtraheat's playing, now.

Haha it's fine, I really don't mind. To be honest, I don't crack my fingers very often; however, they were feeling really tight, which would hinder my playing. I did not think the sound would actually be audible, or else I would have done it before

You're probably right. But I have something to add, as an example. Nearly every time I play basketball, I get the ball straight-on to a finger or fingers, and it really hurts and has injury potential.

I used to tell students not to play basketball, just because of that. But I've thought about it a little more carefully, realized that this is probably because I'm bad at basketball, and now I tell students:

Take extra care with sports you're not good at. Don't play them at all, in the few weeks before a performance.

Something very much like that happened to me this morning in softball.
I'll survive.
But I can't really do piano for a little while.

Call me stupid.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/video/video.php?v=1167791641844&ref=mf

Here is my new performance of the piece from my recital on Sunday... I did not get to warm up, so there are a couple of blatant mistakes, but I think that my interpretation is a lot better. Tell me if it doesn't let you watch it

Can you post a performance for non facebook members to see or hear?

That video isn't there anyway....you need to upload it to Youtube.

[edit] It might be your privacy settings.

I couldn't find it either.