What with all the business of naming this pattern, I figured I’d better get a move on, and get some knitting done on it. I pulled it out yesterday afternoon, and knit a few rows or so of the central portion before deciding that it would be really nice to know how much farther I needed to go. I counted the center rows that I have. I did some math. I did more math. I figured, I counted. Then I held the shawl up, and actually measured it. I discovered at this point that I am done knitting the center! If you take what’s already there, double the ending bit, the shawl will be plenty long. Woot! I quite happily started the more interesting business of the shaping and nupps.

Then near disaster struck.

I hit a huge, supremely tangled yarn barf.

Ick.

It took the better part of two hours to untangle it all and rewind the yarn from the other end. That done, the knitting progressed much more smoothly. Then I joined Dave next door for dinner. He and Bob planned our meal around the fact that Bob had an overabundance of carrots. Carrots were involved in three parts of our dinner last night: carrot salad, carrot-ginger soup, and carrot cake. It’s a good thing we all like carrots! Actually, the entire meal was fabulous. The small lobster tails were no small part of it. While there, I actually got to the first nupp row of the second side of the shawl before wine and good aromas completely overcame me, and I packaged it all up to take home again.

Summer of Socks 2009

This year’s Summer of Socks KAL has been announced. The order of the year is simplification. As part of that, there will be no specific SOS blog this year. To participate, you need to have a Ravelry account, and sign up for the SOS Ravelry group. I’ve donated a prize again this year. This time it’s a printed copy of my Flying Lindy sock pattern. I’ll be mailing the pattern off to the organizers within a week.

Mercury? In retrograde?

I took a few delicious minutes this morning to read the Yarn Harlot’s two most recent posts. According to one of her readers, Mercury is in retrograde, and is causing all sorts of travel, communication, and technical problems. I wonder if that’s why my data drive freaked out on me midday yesterday. If you can come up with a better reason for the drive to simply stop, and for my computer to hang three times in 15 minutes, please do tell! I noticed during that bit that it seemed to work just fine when its back was facing the CPU, and would hang when its back was facing the wall—a position it’s worked just fine in for the better part of a month. Never mind. I’m not sure I want to know. Needless to say, I finally learned my lesson, and allow it to face the way it’s most happy.