Olympics: Different augggggggghs for different folks

I am still fighting being caught up in Olympic Fever. But I had no option to knit on my other projects because I cleverly left them at work.

So I met Sarah at the bookstore Friday and we knitted a bit. This meant that I got all the stitches for the back of the pink sweater onto needles, and borrowed a bunch of Sarah's stitchmarkers (which she will be lucky to see again). We knitted for awhile, and I noticed one of the cables had a backwards loop, which was not that big a deal. I went home, where I have lots of needles (none, apparently, the right size circular for doing the sleeves, but whatever) and fixed that.

I knit a bit more yesterday (and while it was brilliant and sunny, Mena and I went for a walk) and then this morning I laid the sweater-back onto the Template Sweater and it was big enough. I did some shaping for the neck and got it cast off. Picked up the front, started to pick up the stitches (these was a chunk of cast-off, but it came out easily enough and if the sweater is going to be Really Wide it may as well be Really Long) when I noticed.....

There was a hole way down on the right corner. I don't like to think m-ths, as EZ spelled it, but something had chewed through three strands of yarn and a little on the very edge. It could well have been a c-t, instead; we have some delinquent behavior from time to time. There was a reversed cable fairly high on the right so I fixed that, not nearly as featly as I had the other one. I started to drop four stitches down to the hole. It took a long time, and I was only about a third of the way down, when I realized I had been dropping a perfectly healthy cable. Cursed a lot.

I repaired the dropped stitches. It took even longer. I noticed there was a reversed cable right up near the top on the left (hey, I started this three years ago and even though I am Perfect now, of course, I was still improving then and right and left were not installed when they built my brain). I got that cable mostly fixed, and although it went more quickly, it looked like -- well, not good. Really, obviously not good. I ripped back the top three inches of the front. Pow. Wham. No more holes. Never mind the work I did reversing the cables.

The hole toward the bottom was still there. Ripping/dropping down to it was not looking good. I stitched around it twice with dental floss and began unravelling until the damage was clear, and semi-spliced new pieces of yarn onto the ragged ends and semi-grafted the stitches and even though it isn't cabled there it looks better than I really dared hope. Pulling out the dental floss was almost enough fun to make up for the rest. Except that I better not find any more evidence of anything that looks like m-ths, which I regard with as much disgust and shame as I would a nasty venereal disease.

I needed a break.

So I read a book. Lest you think I only read improving non-fiction, I should recommend Katherine Kerr's Deverrynovels, and Holly Lisle and definitely Kage Baker.
Those are only the ones I'm not ashamed to admit, unlike these.

I have been reading too much, yes.

Can I spin for a while?