Riiiiiippp!

I love snow and if I had not been in a funk when I posted on Sunday night I would've showed you this picture taken from my front door.

As you can see, we got quite a bit of snow. Not as much as they did up north but enough to cover my nasty lawn and bring down a sizeable limb in my front yard. (see it there on the right?) This picture was taken early Sunday morning when I went outside to escape the gaggle of preteen girls who had invaded my home. Actually I got a call from the movie theater on Saturday afternoon - mommy can A & B sleep over tonight? I must've been out of my mind because I said yes. They were really pretty well behaved - they just didn't sleep. Well behaved or not - preteen girls are NEVER QUIET.

As they say, hindsight is 20-20, so I'm thinking that maybe the decibel level in my house may have contributed to the horror that was my first 2 days with the Diamons Fantasy Shawl. Sunday night after i posted about my misery I read a few other blog entries abothreatut DFS and realized that I must rip it out in it's entirety. It was painful but I did it. I also concluded that adding stitch marker to delineate each repeat might help - it does. I also read Grumperina's post about her Dad's new black socks and how challenging she found it to work with black yarn. Duh!

Yesterday they closed schools here even though it no longer resempled the picture above. Actually the streets in my neighborhood and beyond were perfectly clear. There was no snow, slush or ice on the streets and yet the schools were closed. The willingness of the school district to close at the threat of bad weather is usually a sore subject here - but not yesterday. I cheerfuly volunteered to stay home with the girls. More knitting time - you understand - right?

As I said, I ripped out the whole DFS and started over.

• No TV
• No noisy kids
• Perfect daylight
• Total concentration

5 hours later I got up off the couch having completed chart A and chart B - perfectly! Apparently this is not really a project that I can do casually. Any distraction at all get's me totally discombobulated - in other words All Fucked Up!

My DH finally begged me to put it down and get buck to my happy place with some socks. I obliged and was doing fine till I came to the heel on Stinkerbelle's sock. Bulls eye heel - WTF!Much cursing and fretting. Talk among yourselves while I work it out. I'll tell you about it later.

By the way, thanks so much for the encouragement on the DFS. You have no idea how much I need that.