repetitive stress injury?

I have not played a guitar for just over 24 hours.

About a week ago, I began to feel pain in my wrist and fingers. This has come and gone for a while now, and I have regarded it as a kind of withdrawal, which has led me to play more. But in the last week, it has become noticeable a lot of the time.

I think it's partly due to the fact that, in the last weeks of summer and the early weeks of the semester, I've gone from playing on average an hour a day to playing more like 90 minutes average daily, but distributed unevenly. This, in turn, is partly due to my uneven class schedule and to my loveliest returning to choir rehearsals on Monday nights. On non-class days and on rehearsal evenings, I've started to play more like 3 hours, often with little or no break.

That doesn't strike me as a lot, especially since I don't play lead and don't tend to play arpeggios. I'm basically a rhythm guitarist. On the other hand, almost none of what I play lacks some kind of extremely weird fingering, and I've been hitting some fingerpicked 12-string stuff and the goofy song I've written with (literally, no exaggeration) 26 chords in it rather hard lately.

So I'm grounded until my left hand stops twinging.

This evening I was reduced to sitting on the love seat, rocking back and forth while holding Kate, my Breedlove 12, and strumming the strings a couple times, without fretting.

Madness shall, without doubt, ensue rapidly, forestalled only by the brief snippets of happiness I'll get watching the Penguins, streamed over the Net, in one-quarter of my laptop screen. Tiny, tiny Penguins scoring tiny, tiny goals.