Last night I learned something interesting about my knitting. (Well, I learned that I really suck and that I can't count to seven reliably, but that's for another day.)
I always thought that I had a lot of knitting projects on the go because I was weak, flighty, not particularly monogamous in this particular area.
I thought that I just lacked focus. (Joe just spit coffee. Having endured marital debate with me I am sure he would like you to know that I have endless focus for other things. Like, say...the lesson that if I go away for five (5) days, NOTHING that I cooked before I left should still be in the fridge when I come back, or that cucumbers have truly lost all of their nutritional usefulness once they are a vague brown liquid in the bottom of the crisper and that if you have to POUR a vegetable out of the fridge you probably should have gotten to it a little sooner. (Sorry. Turns out that I'm not quite over yesterdays talking points. I'll try to lose focus on that.)
Turns out that I have several projects on the go at once for reasons that actually make sense and aren't just a sign of my lack of knitterly integrity.
1. If you have several projects on the go then you don't have to tell your family that you can't go to the movies during the Olympics because you are at a chart part. You just go get your sock.
2. If you had (hypothetically speaking of course) a manuscript that you needed to finish looking over
you wouldn't need to choose between doing that and doing your olympic knitting. You could just choose something that would go around and around nicely while you read and nobody would have to resent anything.
3. If you had lots to choose from then at the exact moment that you thought "Double pointed needles are dumbass" when you (for the third time in 24 hours) pulled a needle free of your work while taking the thing in and out of your purse, that exact moment you could go and get a project on straights and glare viciously at the dpns until you felt better.
4. Finally, if for reasons that you cannot explain, having successfully knit stuff exactly like this before, and despite having used an entire collection of post-it-notes to mark your spots on the chart and counted and counted and tinked and swore and pulled the work out a grand total of six (6) times before you got the establishing row right on the top of the sleeve, you could pretend to your blog readers that you had abandoned it out of boredom instead of having to admit that a row of 119 stitches had kicked your arse.
I'm starting to get a little twitchy, and it isn't just the knitting monogamy that's getting to me. Astute readers will have noticed the presence of a new ticker on the sidebar, a gift from the clever husband of Anny (I think you can get the code from her - assuming that she can look up from her Olympic knitting long enough - remember to keep the demands on Olympians low right now. They need their focus.) and I LOVE it, but I'm torn. I think I might have to start only looking at it once a day, instead of knitting in front of it, watching it tick nauseatingly ever closer to the finish line.
Dudes. I have so got to finish this sleeve.
(PS. What do you think the odds are that I'll laugh if someone tells me they see a mistake in that?)