Blame it on the Plague

It's no excuse for my extended blog absence, but I have been struck down for most of this week with a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad cold. The type of cold where on the first day, when I came home from work after a drive home spent shivering violently with what I later found to be a 103.3 fever, I was pretty sure I had the flu. The real flu, not the thing that people call the flu but is really just some random virus. But then the next day I was able to get off the couch and eat something, which does not happen when you have the real flu, as I know from when the husband had it two years ago. I did, however, run a borderline fever for so long that I became convinced that the thermometer was broken, but no. Apparently my bronchial tubes and sinuses were under attack, and I was burning from the heat of battle. I am feeling better, though - good enough to go to work tomorrow and face the toddlers, at any rate. Even though it was probably one of them that got me sick. And even though this is the second time I've been sick this winter, and I should really get some extra days, because that's not fair.

Anyway, onto other things. I am knitting socks for someone. Never fear, non-knitting friends, I am not about to turn all knitting-blog on your asses, mostly because I knit so slowly that I would post even more rarely than I do now. But I want to say that this has been the most frustrating project I have worked on since I started knitting. Perhaps it's because I still had a high temperature yesterday when I started on them, but I have had to backtrack over and over and over again. They are a present for someone, and the husband suggested that when they're finished (he was being optimistic), I should present them along with a soundtrack of me making them so they could identify the techniques. ("Oh, so that's a goddamn stupid motherfucking short row. How lovely.") They are toe-up, which is the trickier way to knit socks, for me at least, since you have to use a weird cast-on. And then, I was online double-checking something about the stitch pattern I was using, and saw someone refer to it as a pretty easy four-row pattern. Which was a problem, because what I was doing only had three rows. So I had to undo the whole thing.

And if that whole paragraph sounded like "And then I had to put flibbety-flabber in the diddly-doo," then I'm sorry. Join me next time, when I'll share the Tale of the Weiner-Licking Dog. And unless they cause me a great deal more hardship, I won't mention the socks again except to maybe post a picture of them when they are finally all done.