Piano update

So a while back I posted about my piano revival; after 10 years of not playing, mainly due to lack of an actual piano, I decided to buy a digital piano and start to play again. My idea was to play as often as possible, but at least either a) 3 hours a week or b) 10 minutes after dinner every day. Unsurprisingly, this did not happen.
With our living room stuffed full of books as it is, the piano is hidden away in a room upstairs, a room that generally does not have the heating on. So if I want to play for more than 5 minutes and/or without freezing hands, I have to turn the heating on at least half an hour in advance. This kind of planning is not something my rare impromptu moments of playing are very well adapted to. Added to that, the piano is living up to its cheap nature; some of the keys make this awful 'woink' sound when you release them, so playing without headphones on is no fun, and playing with headphones one is also no fun because you want to hear the sound reverberate in the air. Also, it really does take a lot of energy, and an hour of playing still leaves me quite drained, both physically and mentally. But all that are just excuses for not playing as much as I actually could, or want to.
Because I still really love to play. I've been working through my old books chronologically, and am now in a position that I can actually play some of the more difficult and longer pieces in one go on the first retry. Some of my old favourites are completely back up to scratch and I use those as a reward when I get stuck in one of the more difficult ones. However, because I play so irregularly, my fingers still really really hurt when I try to do the more difficult things that involve lots of fast or repetitious moves. So after an hour, I do have to call it quits, even though I may just be warming up into something difficult. And then it may be more than a week before I find (or rather: make) time to play again.
I measure my progress against my ability to play Comptine d'un Autre Ete, which was the reason I originally started playing again. I would have thought I would be halfway decent on that song by now, given that I try to play it every time. But there is no way I will be playing it in its entirety for the next half year or so; today I finally managed to play the first eight bars correctly, without mistakes, and in the slowest speed ever.
The thing may be that on some of the older songs, my fingers still somehow 'remember'  the moves, especially the difficult ones because I practised them so often. And with this new song, I have to learn all these tricks all over again, its not a question of repeating what I already could do once. So my progress is nowhere near as fast as I'd hoped, and that can be a bit hard, but I'm still hanging in there. Working towards this goal is a good thing, even though it is taking me really long and it is sometimes hard to stay motivated.
But I've promised myself that when I can actually play it, and still like playing, I may reward myself with a better (digital) piano. And maybe even lessons. Which I shouldn't have quit in the first place, but that decision is 10 years in the past, so best to focus on what I can still salvage today!