What A Week

This week wiped me out. I've been trying to get myself off my horrendous 3am bedtime, 9am wake time schedule all week with variable success. Since that's only 6 hours a night, it's no wonder I'm exhausted right now. I was really looking forward to the weekend to relax, too, but turns out I've got a few thousand lines of data I need to sort through and a few hundred calculations to make before I can get any sort of break. Boo on that. I love Excel, my passion for its number-crunching ways has been established, but sometimes I just need some space in our relationship, some time to see other people (like my poor neglected Fiasco). Sigh.

In happier news, I finished another hat!

Malabrigo Chunky, colorway Vaa

I made this up as I went along, I like how it turned out well enough. It's difficult to know where that line between "This is my design" and "I made this up" is. This hat is simple and anybody could do it, but I did fudge the heck out of the decreases at the top, 65 stitches decreased down to 9 outside of the cable panel, so I don't know if it would be easily reproducible and it's probably not helpful to have directions that say "Now just decrease where it makes sense to until there aren't any stitches left..." Regardless, nothing says "instant gratification" better than a hat knit with bulky yarn. Yay! One holiday hat left to go...

I was all set to cast on my Cotty socks last night when I realized that the needles I like using with STR Mediumweight were already occupied by this pretty thing:

STR Mediumweight, colorway Puck's Mischief

This is the wonderfully addicting South Fork Socks pattern that I truly love. I started these in October and they were moving along nicely until I put them down at one point and forgot on which row I was crossing my cables. I am morally opposed to row counters (ok, not really, they just annoy me) and prefer to simply read my knitting but I have a much harder time reading cabled fabric than plain or lace fabric and I got all confused. Was I crossing the cables 4 rows after the slipped stitches? 5? I can't remember, I can't tell, ahhhhhh! So the dreaded Cable Confusion stalled these socks. Then I got over it, gave some things a try, wrote down the right answer so I wouldn't forget, and decided to finish these socks before I start my Cotty's. The Cotty KAL goes until March so I have plenty of time to get to those. But I still want to cast on a new sock for myself in January, so I'm going to knit Blathnat, the January Mystery sock pattern designed by Irishgirlieknits for the Sock Knitter's Anonymous group on Ravelry. I think I'll use some Bugga for it.

So, revised sock goals for January:

1. finish X-mas Rocks socks (75% done)
2. finish South Fork socks (40% done)
3. start Blathnat socks
4. start secret Valentine's Day socks

That will do for now, I think! I also have plans for mittens, oh boy do I have plans for mittens. I've been knitting for about 4 years now and I have yet to make myself a pair of mittens. I have fingerless gloves out the wazoo, but no mittens. However, I think I'll talk about those tomorrow. :-) Happy Friday! Someone go have fun for me while I fight with my dataset, please!