So depressing to be back at work on a Monday with a full week stretching before me.
So I had my exciting four-day weekend, and I spent the first day either in bed, running around taking care of errands, or visiting Dad, before coming home and IIRC going pretty much straight to bed.
Friday was me visiting my grandfather, and taking my sister and two-year-old nephew out to visit him. I got up much earlier than I needed to and got to sit around watching a bit of TV while working on the heel flap of Mom's Xmas sock, before heading over to pick up Lauren and Aidyn and head east. Turned out I'd gotten up very much earlier than needed, since my grandfather wasn't even home -- out getting sworn in as an election judge, I was told by the lady at the Chamber of Commerce when I headed over to inquire as to his whereabouts, and found out after the fact that he'd had to wait an hour longer than planned to get that done. So I took Lauren and Aidyn to Sonic for lunch (one of exactly two places to eat in the town) and when we got back our grandfather was there. It was a nice visit, though we kept not taking care of things we said we needed to (like getting a copy of the DVD-R of that bit of Library of Congress film footage of the mission to Russia Paw-Paw flew in sixty-odd years ago, or making sure he had Lauren's mailing address right for the savings bond he set up for Aidyn), and we were so late leaving that night that I was having a hard time staying awake on the road. Again, pretty much straight to bed once I got home.
Saturday I was either worn out, or my allergies were really getting on top of me, or maybe I had an actual one-day cold. The pollen count didn't appear to have spiked, I'd taken my usual allergy pill, but my nose was running like a faucet. I had gotten up and into my gym clothes, but somehow never made it out the door to the gym, and eventually gave up pretending I was going to and changed out of my gym clothes so I could throw them into the wash. (That was basically the one thing I regret not having taken care of over the weekend. OTOH, the 24-Hour Fitness Center around the corner is closing right about now -- may have even already closed -- and my membership has been transferred to the just-renovated-and-reopened location a few miles away. So I might have run into a few glitches in my planned workout had I gotten out the door.) At least I got my laundry taken care of, and finished the first mitt of the pair that I'm giving my grandmother for Xmas. And did a lot of reading.
Yesterday was a typical Sunday -- got some files cleared off my thumb drive and did a lot of backups, plus some knitting in front of the TV. It's been a very good week for that -- got a lot of stuff off the DVR (though still not to the Glee or SGU backlog) and made a lot of progress on my various projects.
Finished the first Saturday night -- or rather, in the wee hours Sunday morning -- and got started on the second during Dexter last night. Fast project, attractive result. Wouldn't mind making a few more pairs of these.
Finished the first sock at my grandfather's Friday evening, and got just five rows onto the toe last night during the last half of Mad Men. It's a very narrow ribbing but hopefully comfortable enough. If not, the next time I work this pattern I'll stop a quarter of the way through the final chart instead of halfway, or maybe even at the final full repeat.
And here's Mom's sock, which has been easy enough down the leg, and just fine on the heel, but then turned into a major headache once I reached the foot. There's the gusset, where I'm decreasing down the sides as I go until the bottom has just as many stitches as the top -- and at the same time, I'm having to compensate for the spiralling pattern where it meets the edges of the plain stockinette sole. The pattern as written is not clear as to how this should be accomplished. (There's a comment about decreasing in a purl welt at the side of the foot, which isn't even on the page with the instructions for working the foot -- it's an offhand remark in the opening notes for the pattern, a page-turn away from the actual instructions.)
The chart migrates sideways, a yarnover to the right and an extra decrease to the left, and I think part of my problem is the foot having only enough stitches across for two-and-two-thirds repeats, so I'm having to continually try to compensate for knitting two together when there's only one stitch present to be knit at the leading edge. And then I get to the other edge of the top of the foot and can't remember whether I did the decrease or not, and debate over whether I should do a yarnover at the very end to compensate or not, and it wasn't until I'd knit as far onto the foot as the above picture shows that I took another good hard look at the photos in the book and concluded that I should be letting the decrease stitches migrate off the edge of the chart to the right, not starting up new decrease stitches to the left but only letting plain k2 p2 ribbing gradually fill up the top of the foot, and then when the last of the decreases has reached the sole and vanished, starting up a new set slanting in the opposite direction using the chart labeled for the opposite sock. The book does not tell me to do this, but I did some browsing on Ravelry last night and it's what everyone appears to have been doing with their socks. (The part that I find the most maddening is that no one else seems to have mentioned this in their own project notes, or been confused by what they're supposed to be doing when reaching the foot. I'd feel a lot better if it wasn't just me having this issue.)
I think I need to just go ahead and frog back to the heel and try again. At least I have a better idea of the issues I'm compensating for, or something?
And here's this, which I haven't done a photo of for a month or so. A certain amount of progress, though not exciting. Not a rush project, though.
I should really have posted this and been winding things up half an hour ago. Especially since I've got a grocery run to make on the way home. Ah, well.
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