6.8

     I have not given up on the Report-It.  I spent a couple of days not using it, just because it was driving me crazy and I felt like I had to get some actual practice in. I still felt like I could benefit from it after that, though, so I had a friend walk me through the process outlined in the manual and make sure I was doing everything at the proper angles.  I tried to use it that way, I really did, but it just wasn’t comfortable.  Then I realized that I always write with my shoulders rasied up.  So, I tried really hard to force them down and hold them there and put the Report-It in a position that would be comfortable like that.  It’s only one spacer lower than where it was before, actually.  I haven’t gotten the kinks worked out of that yet, either, but for the first time my right arm doesn’t hurt.

     My right arm was always the one that hurt no matter what, and now my left arm hurts instead.  I ordered some leather key tabs from Depobook on April 24^th, and for various reasons, they didn’t arrive until yesterday.  I put some on the right lower bank to test it out, and I realized I was going to have to put them on the upper bank, too.  They’re pretty cool.  At first I thought they felt weird, but then today I did all of my practice with them on, just on the right side, and I could really tell a difference.  The keys on the left all of a sudden felt very hard and painful, and the key tabs were nice and soft.  It seems to help with knowing where the keys are, too.
     For some reason I don’t feel like I have to press as hard on those keys.  I guess because as soon as I feel the tabs, I know I’ve touched key and it’s going to register.  I also noticed that if I put the tab a little bit beyond where the key actually is, the space between the banks doesn’t bother me as much.  For some reason, ever since I got the LS, it seemed like the spaces between the banks were too big and it bothered me, even though I think they’re supposed to be exactly the same as on any other machine.  If I hang the tab a little bit over into that space, it still registers as pressing both keys, which is awesome.  I have to experiment with how much space I want to have there now.  I just put tabs on the left side, and I didn’t leave any space at all.  I figured I know by now where the keys are so that shouldn’t bother me, but I think I am getting some instances of both keys registering when I only meant to stroke one.

     The great thing about these tabs is that they're so easy to remove that you don’t have to do anything besides just pull them right off, and then you can re-attach them.  That's one of the reasons I got this kind of key tab, although I didn’t know they would be that easy to take off.  I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that I won’t have to adjust the sensitivity of my keys at all.  I thought that might be a problem, but as far as I can tell, everything still registers just fine.

     Of course, I haven’t made any progress on my piece at all, which is depressing, but I hit 260 at the end of it today, which hasn’t happened in quite a while. I found out the other day that the word "rind" wasn’t in my dictionary, which I thought was weird.