It finally happened....

I fell down while ice skating today.  This hasn't happened in years, but I'm taking it to mean that I'm learning something.  Let me relate the events that led up to this incident:  I'd been skating around normally during today's public skating session, when I passed this older gentleman with an obvious figure skater physique with Russian-looking facial bone structure consulting a man and his son who didn't know much about skating, insisting that, "You learn from doing!"  Now, of course this statement is fairly obvious and the very thought has occurred to me that if I want to get better at skating, I have to practice the moves that are giving me difficulty or that I am not performing as smoothly as I would like.  However, I'd been self-conscious skating alone and seeing people practice their jumps and spins while I don't even know how to do the bunny hop successfully.  

     Nevertheless, I started off slowly by practicing my forward crossovers every once in a while as I skated around the rink, and then occasionally took corners of the ice (people do this during the lunchtime skating sessions because there aren't as many people at the rink then as there are on weekend days.) to practice my t-stops.  I can do these successfully most of the time, but only when I am looking down at my feet; for some reason I need to be looking down to make sure my back foot is turned out enough.  I know that I should just pay attention to (a) feeling my hip being adequately turned out and (b) assuring that my back blade hits the ice properly, but, at this point, I haven't mastered this stop without looking down.  This is how I fell.  After several points of accidentally sticking my toepick in the ice and successfully renavigating myself, I finally fell on my knee.  I just realized I could have put the Hello Kitty icepack my mom bought for me on it!  Shoot!

In other news, I just went to the music library and picked up 8 books on the baroque period, which is something I hope to study for my project for my course on French Culture until 1789.  We'll see how that works.