Days Like These

The sound you hear is the sound of my head thwacking away on my kitchen table. Again, and again, and again.

We found a mini-van last week and I've been waiting to post until I get a picture of the dang thing, but that's really not the point of my post today. Because I still do not have a proper picture. Not that it matters. If you go online and find a picture of a 2008 Grand Caravan and imagine it in white, you will know what my van looks like. I'm shocked, really, because we've never had a car that was made in the same decade in which we were driving it. It's so new I almost forget that it's not. I'm just really, really hoping that it doesn't break down for a year or two because that would be really discouraging.

In any case. This is what I'm posting about today: Knitting. Knitting and how the Knitted Fates are conspiring to drive me insane in all the least pleasant ways. For Christmas my dear mother was so thoughtful as to give me a skein of beautiful (hand wash) alpaca sock yarn. Beautiful. I sat down and for two weeks (or more) I knit myself a sock. A lovely, soft Jaywalker sock. I finished it the other night and cast on to knit the second sock. I finished the inch of cuff ribbing and commenced on the leg pattern. Here is where I realize that I'm so slow-witted that I should never be allowed to touch wool to needles again. The pattern stitch is simple: Knit a row plain, knit a row pattern, knit a row plain, repeat. But I am so backward that I didn't understand the directions the first time and the Knitted Fates, in all their contemptible humor, have decided to open the Eyes of Revelation upon me just as I am about to begin the Second Sock. When I read the instructions the first time, I understood it (bizaarly) to mean that I should only be repeating the patterned row of the pattern again and again and not alternate the two patterns.

I had a stone cold moment when I realized that my Doom Was Upon Me and that I'd entirely eff'ed up the whole first sock. Utterly. Gaaaaah! Noooo! It can't BE! But I did. I am defeated. Now I don't know what to do! I can do the second sock in my NEW! And INVENTIVE! pattern (which looks suspiciously like a Jaywaller sock, despite its, uh, eccentricites). I can do the second sock correctly and just admire how handknitted things can be so, er, unique. Or I can rip the damned first sock out and reknit it the RIGHT way (cursing myself the whole time for being such a moron) and then move on to the second sock.

I don't know what to do. What would YOU do?