with apologies to Dickens

It was a weekend of highs and a weekend of lows. It was a weekend of much ripping and a weekend of surprising progress. It has marked three weeks since my last yarn purchase.

The highs included: a great community theater performance of Noises Off (I laughed hysterically); a couple of great dinners out (Garlic Rose on Friday for Hubby's b-day and a surprisingly good prime rib at a diner); seeing some of my all-time favorite songs played live (even if it brought me to tears a couple of times).

The lows included: ripping the left front of Shadow, again, on the way home Friday; evil, nasty, inexplicable heart burn; Hubby having a meltdown while his parents were over for dinner and having stomach issues of his own before the concert yesterday; a couple of really crappy nights' sleep.

And yes, it has been three weeks since the great Stitches Haul. It's been easy to deny the stash urges, I just click on the pic of what's waiting for me and the need for MORE YARN just fades away. Heck, for a while, the Stitches Haul had replaced Billy on my desktop (does that make me a bad mommy?).

Queen + Paul Rodgers was awesome. Well not so much the Paul Rodgers part. Love him in Bad Company, had no problem singing over him with Queen. Queen was my favorite band for a looong time. Something about Freddie and his over-the-top show presence and operatic singing style spoke to me as a child listening to my mom's Greatest Hits LP. I guess there's just something about a flamingly-gay man that appeals to a pre-pubescent girl with absolutely no idea of what a flamingly-gay man is. Queen was my soundtrack for a long time and I didn't think I'd ever hear those songs live. Granted, last night was only 1/2 of the original band (John Deacon said no thanks), but Brian May and Roger Taylor did a great job and I was able to live with Paul Rodgers. They honored Freddie well and some of the video footage they showed brought me to tears. I must say that I loved, loved, loved singing Love of My Life with Brian in tribute to Freddie.

As for the surprising progress, after ripping Shadow again, I'm surprised to be this far along. It didn't seem like I'd done that much knitting this weekend. The ripping is kind of funny, I was knitting blisfully along Friday afternoon on the extremely long commute home (rain again) and realized that my counts were off. For half the rows, there were fewer stitches between the YOs and PSSOs. Hrrm. So I counted the beginning, that was right. Then I looked for but didn't see any obvious errors. Then I counted the rows. Somehow, I managed to inadvertently short row in the middle somewhere. I dunno what happened! I thought about putting in a lifeline and only ripping back part, but decided that I wasn't so far along for all that and ripped it all out. I got back to about where I was by the time I went to bed Friday night (it was a really looooong commute, plus the play had two intermissions). Saturday, I placed the pocket and since I've been just slogging along to the armhole shaping. The orange thing in the pic is a stitch holder. Instead of binding off as the pattern called for at the pocket, I put the stitches on the holder to either graft the pocket flap or do a 3-needle bind-off. If it needs a bit more stability, I'll go back over with a needle and thread. I'm still liking this knit, but I want to be done already!