Could somebody please remind me why I agreed to this?

Okay, Thanksgiving is only five days away and I'm having 11 people over for dinner and I haven't even started cleaning the apt. Which might not be bad if I had cleaned the apt. sometime in the last several months, but since I haven't, it's a wee bit of a disaster. Why do I always put off cleaning until the last minute? Oh, yeah, because I hate to clean. That's right. That's why I haven't cleaned in months to begin with. Well, now that we've got that settled, where's the broom? And the china, because I've gotta wash it before we can use it. And the crystal. And the good silverware. And the good tablecloth that must be ironed. Along with the napkins.

Right. Okay. We're just going to ignore that horror and hope it goes away on it own (it never has before, but that's no reason to lose hope is it?). I need something to calm me. Wine? Chocolate martini?

Just because I have a mountain of housework to do doesn't mean I haven't been knitting (have to do something when I become overworked from the thought of mopping). Thursday night, I finished my blue socks.


See, isn't it purty? (the sock, not my leg)

And, I found the best instructions for the Kitchner stitch in Stitch 'n Bitch. I have looked high and low for good instructions and always I found pretty much the same ones that I apparently don't understand because I always screw it up. But this time, I took the old SnB off the shelf to see what it had to say, and it had diagrams! They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I had about four thousand new words with which to figure out the dreaded K stitch. By the end of the second sock, I had it pretty well down. I'm sure I'll have to drag the book out the next time I need to finish socks (except for the next pair of socks, because I'm knitting those toe-up), but at least I no longer fear the big K.

However, I did have one moment of panic. I had woven all the ends in and pulled one of the socks on to take the above picture when I saw a hole start to develop in the leg of the sock! What the hell???? A more experienced blogger would have taken a picture of the catastrophe that had unfolded (unraveled?) before my very eyes (hell, a more experienced blogger would've remembered to bring the digital camera back home from lab), so that you too could experience the horror, but I panicked (a more experienced knitter might not have panicked, knowing that it could be fixed, but I'm neither an experienced knitter, nor particularly level-headed late in the evening). Fortunately, I was able to do a mediocre job of darning the hole and I think everything is okay now. So what happened? Upon further inspection, I noticed the hole was right next to the end of a woven-in thread. I can only surmise that I nicked the stitches next to the end of the yarn when cutting it. Let this be a lesson to you all--do not trust the scissors! They will turn on you if they can! Be ever-vigilant for the stray point!

At any rate, I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out--even the mended one--and I really love the yarn: Fortissima Cotton. It's supersoft.

Ghiradelli took time out of his busy day to pose with the new additions to my sock drawer: