It is a stupid kind of hot, and this heat may in fact be reducing the intelligence of human beings, or at least me. Together with the humidity, it is 43 C/ 109 F. (The humidity is about 50%. The combination of my curly fine hair and this environment means that if the weather doesn’t break soon I am going to only be able to wear button up shirts, since I seriously doubt that a tee shirt will go over my enormous unintentional country singer hair.)

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I was knitting on the roundabout tank on Saturday night and it was looking pretty good. I was feeling happy and it was all coming together. I’d gotten word that Lee Ann’s brain surgery went really well and that she was recovering nicely, and I was emotionally and karmically prepared to begin having things go well again, and they did.

I went to bed feeling really grand about the whole thing. When I got up in the morning, this is what I saw.

I swear to you, I swear it, that before I went to bed I admired my work, put the knitting in my basket and went upstairs. Sunday morning, the knitting was still in the basket and I picked it up and knit a half row before I saw the disaster. This tank is knit like a long scarf, and at then end of each row, the last stitch is joined together with a stitch from the top of the course below. (This joins the scarf into a tube that spirals up until, at least theoretically, you have enough of a tank to cover your brace and bits, and you whack straps on that sucker and move on with your life.)

Upon closer examination, I can see that the stitch that has “let go” is the one that joins those two pieces, although for the life of me, and maybe it’s just the heat, I can’t imagine how it could have happened.

I have pondered several possibilities.

1. I dropped a stitch.

I would totally buy this, considering that it certainly “looks” like a dropped stitch, but I have the same number of stitches that I had before the renegade stitch down and unhooked the whole thing. In my experience at least, dropping a stitch results in one stitch less. I suppose it’s possible that I had one stitch too many and didn’t notice, but that seems like I’m overly complicating things.

2. The cat (despite being a long-haired cat who is coping with the heat by lying flat and unmoving on her back, splayed out in a way that by comparison, makes most hairy, male, shirtless, couch surfing, beer-drinking football fans look “classy”.) got up in the night and screwed around with it.

Possible, but this would mean that the cat has taken her regular level of sabotage to a whole new level by taking our stuff out of baskets, screwing with it, and (here is the part that seem unlikely..) putting it back into the basket when she is done with it. It’s not the degree of cunning or cleverness I find unlikely there…It’s the tidiness. What sort of cat would save you having to clean up?

3. Joe did it.

While I have suspected for some time now that my esteemed mate was put on this earth to screw with my mental state and draw me as close to the edge as is possible for one to go and still do laundry…I find it difficult to believe that he would mess with Alchemy Silk.

There’s crazy and difficult (and I believe that is still his goal) and then there’s suicidal.

4. The children

Again, possible… but I can not suspect the teenagers. I went to bed after them, I got up before them, and if you have teens, then you know that there is just about zero chance that they stood up during possible sleep hours without being whipped up to an upright position by a parent, being offered a buffet of some kind, or needing to escape a fire. That said, on Saturday night in this house, we had a confounding variable.

Hank. Hank is six now, and during his 24 hour sleepover, he was alone downstairs for about 3.5 minutes on Sunday morning while I brushed my teeth. Hank is…

Busy…

Exuberant…

Fast….

and interested in yarn.

Behold Hank’s latest winding project. This ball was rewound about 23 times before he found something better to do and left it mid-wind.



I have a feeling I solved my mystery. Does anyone have another idea about what might have happened to the tank …Or should Hank just be glad that it’s too freaking hot to catch a speeding six year old.