Ch-ch-ch-changes

Last night was not a good knitting night. If you do not want to hear a verbose and sordid tale of a knitting related brain fart, go ahead and scroll down to the shiny pictures at the bottom. I settled in to get a big chunk of my Ranger Hat done, and instead frogged the whole thing. I was happily knitting along in a 4 x 3 rib, and when it was long enough, I went to start the pattern row. I looked up how to do the twist stitches online, and set about it. I knitted about 4 repeats when I noticed the twists looked a bit wonky. The first row of twists should have been making a little V shape, which comprises the bottom of the diamond in the pattern. My V shapes were upside down. With out giving a single, fleeting thought to the chart, I was reading left to right like a book and not right to left like a pattern. So I frogged that row.

I set about it again, going quite slowly, as I was meticulously checking my twists for correctness (meticulous= obsessive compulsive....I checked them repeatedly.) I got to the end of the row, finally, and found myself with an excess of 3 stitches. The twist repeats are 3 stitch twists, so I figured I must have missed a twist, despite the utmost obsessive attention I had paid to their correctness. I looked back at my work, and found what I thought was the problem (the presence of the word thought does not bode well here). I frog back to that point, and can't for the life of me find the error. Then it dawns on me.....the math. The counting. In a flash I thought of all the times I had giggled at the Yarn Harlot's hilarious accounts of being foiled by counting. I cast on the wrong number of stitches. In fact, I cast on for 7.072 pattern repeats. Nice. Ranger hat was frogged. To make myself feel quasi useful, I wound a hank of yarn into a center pull ball and called it a night for knitting.

Starting January 20th, I will be heading back to school to earn a teaching credential. I am so excited to be starting on the same day as President Elect Obama. Perhaps I am just a sucker for eloquent, intelligent rhetoric, but his expanded definition of social service and belief in the ability of every American to make the US and the world a better place truly does give me hope. And goosebumps!

Anywho, here are a few shots I took on campus today. Who says California doesn't have a bit of fall color here and there?