Sock on a Rock!

Attention, readers: we now return to your regularly scheduled knitting content!

Here's the sock that nearly drove me crazy, soaking up the sun at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.


It's hard to tell, but I'm up to the cuff, and I'm just knitting the ribbing until I've used up most of that half of the yarn ball. Then it's on to sock #2. I was warned that one ball of the yarn (Colinette Jitterbug) can be a little short for a pair of socks, but I didn't feel like buying two, so I wound it into two nearly identical balls and am doing the best I can.
So the knitters among you are probably thinking I'm nuts. This is just a simple toe-up sock with a ribbed cuff. No fancy stitch pattern, no bells and whistles, right? So what am I complaining about? Well, to put it briefly: This sock is evil.
I want to say up front that I do not blame Wendy's Detailed Toe-Up pattern. She's a genius, I just had bad sock mojo.
It called for size 0 needles and gave two potential sizes. I started with 1s and made the larger size, because I'm contrary like that. It quickly became clear that it would be too big. So I went back to the 0s and made the smaller size. Knitting progressed (slowly), and by the time I met up with my parents in Illinois for Uncle Dave's funeral, I had turned the heel. My mom tried it on, and it was too small. So I ripped back to before the heel, added some length, and tried again. But then I noticed that I was one stitch short. I thought maybe I had dropped one, but didn't see any ladders. So I decided to increase and keep on going.
But then the OCD part of my brain kicked in, and I couldn't deal with making a sock that had an error in it. So I thought, well, I'll just rip back again until I find the lost stitch. It's got to be there somewhere. By now, you probably know where this is going.
I ripped the whole thing out.
I. Ripped. The. Whole. Thing. Out.
Boo.
This is the sock less than a week after its 3rd incarnation began. It is proof that I can be a speedy knitter when I need to be. I guess I should fly across country more often.
Now, I'm almost done with this one. I'm just hoping it fits my mom ok. I figure it's a bit tight on me, so it should be fine. I'm dreading sock #2, because I can't imagine more ways in which I could screw up this pattern. But I'm sure I'll think of something.

*****
I finally uploaded some of my pictures from the Tucson trip. You can see them by following the links on the sock picture to my Flickr page. They're mostly of the Desert Museum (which was soooooo cool, that's where I saw all the animals) and of our hike through the Sabino Canyon park. I can't believe I willingly went on a hike in the desert. Especially since we saw this at the very beginning:


What exactly counts as "high" mountain lion activity? We joked that maybe they meant the lions were high. Which would also be bad, since then they'd probably be hungry.

The gelato at the end of the day more than made up for the potential hazard of mountain lions, though. I did get to see one at the desert museum, up close through a window behind the caves in its enclosure. Those are some BIG cats. Really pretty, though. One of the other really cool things I saw was a temporary river. It had rained not long before I came, and what was normally a dry wash was now a pretty river. We followed a trail alongside the riverbed and eventually saw a waterfall. In the middle of the desert. Neat!!

The two lovely and charming people in the photos with me are my best friend S and her husband T. They were wonderful hosts, and should be recruited for the Tucson Chamber of Commerce -- at the end of the weekend I was totally ready to move out there. But sadly I had to go back to school. Speaking of which, I should get back to work.

I'll be back with round one of my Wardrobe Therapy shirt piles as soon as possible. I bet you can't wait to see how many t-shirts I own!