Week one: middle C, a sore wrist and a bench that was two inches too low
The piano arrived on a Saturday, bought used from a family whose teenager had quit, and by Saturday evening I had found middle C, which took longer than I would like to admit. The pattern of two black keys and three black keys repeats, and middle C is the white key to the left of the pair nearest the middle of the keyboard. I put a tiny piece of masking tape on it, which every piece of advice says not to do and which I took off after four days.
The first week of the online course was about posture and five notes. Sit so your forearms are level with the keys, elbows slightly in front of your body, feet flat, shoulders down. Thumb on C, one finger per key up to G, play them in order, play them back down, do it with the left hand an octave lower, do it together. That is the whole week. I did fifteen minutes a day because that was what the course suggested and because fifteen minutes of five notes is about as much as a person can stand.
By Wednesday the outside of my right wrist ached, and by Thursday I was holding it in meetings. The cause turned out to be the bench. I was using a dining chair with a seat at about 18 inches, and it put my forearms angled upward to the keys, so my wrists were bent back the whole time and my shoulders were creeping up to compensate. I measured, found that I needed about 20 inches, and folded two bath towels onto the chair. The ache was gone by Sunday. A proper adjustable bench came later, but the towels worked for a month.
The other thing I learned in week one is how loud tension is. On the first recording I made, on day three, every note is the same volume and every note is hard, because I was gripping the keys as though they might escape. By day seven, with the wrist fixed and the course telling me daily to let the arm weight fall, the notes are uneven in the other direction, some loud and some barely sounding, which I am told is progress.
I can play C to G and back, hands together, slowly, and I can read the five notes on the page that correspond to them. That is the whole inventory after seven days and one hour and forty-five minutes of practice. It felt like more.