Vacation! Hurry up and relax!

For the next week, I'm not going to work. No big plans, nowhere else in particular to go, but Adam has this week off because he has to book all his time in July for the coming 12 months and just picked random times. So a few weeks ago I booked the same week off.

And I'm feeling stressed about it. There's so much neglected "when I get to it" stuff in my life, that I've cognitively cluttered the week already now I'm wondering how to get it all in. Well, I admit it's my issue, I'm working on it. I want to finish a now-8-months-overdue baby quilt and get it to New York. I want to clean. I have booked endocrinologist, physiotherapy, and massage appointments. I've picked up a couple extra classes to teach at the gym... all these should be good for me and not stressful. But I want to go hide in the closet. I'm fighting off a meltdown back into social phobia over a "girls night" invitation I've accepted for tonight, because I have homework - that I probably wouldn't do anyway, but it's preoccupying me.

Anyway, relieving the too-busy-ness a bit is the fact that I FINISHED the alligator socks. They're not back to Angry Alligators but they're close to "more trouble than they're worth" Alligators. While finishing the ribbing on the second one, I thought I'd pop the first on one of my cold feet, as hey, my feet were cold and there was at least one sock lying around with nothing better to do. I pulled it on, it fits ok... and ZZZIIIPPPPPP, oh look, a ladder in my knit, through the ribbing and all the way back down the leg. I had somehow dropped a stitch out of the last couple rows of ribbing and not noticed.

What saved this one was the sheer coincidence that the dropped stitch was in one of the two columns in the whole pattern repeat that was, indeed, just a column of knit stitches. So I didn't lose any of the maddening yarnovers I could never find - I could pick it back up with the crochet hook. PHEW. Once I got back to the ribbing, of course, I had to un-do the bind off and the first couple rows of ribbing, as not only had I not noticed I dropped the stitch, I somehow compensated and I could only pull the ladder back up to about halfway through the ribbing, then there was no ladder - I'd knit two together to close it without noticing.

For the record, un-knitting takes alot longer than knitting.

Here's the cranky Alligator masterpiece:



Here's a close-up:



I'm not sure they're my favourites, but they're OK. One toe is pointier than the other as I used more stitches in the cast-on on the second one, but I don't think up I'm to the hassle of taking it out. Beside, I'm on to something new again.



Despite my utter failure of a crochet chain cast-on, Toe #1 on the Rockin' Monsoon socks tickled me so much, I started toe #2 from the other end of the yarn ball and I think I'll knit both socks simultaneously. For Toe #2, I even found out how to do the chain - rather than crochet the chain and try to pick up bumps, you crochet the chain AROUND the first knitting needle! MUCH smoother. I found an illustrated how-to at that just made it seem so simple.

Now, I have yet to unzip that, but we'll see. Upward into the sock feet we go!