To rip or not to rip

that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of colors gone wonky, or... OK, I've lost it, but you get the picture. I should say at the outset that I am inclined not to rip, but I am happy for input from any and all.

Here's the problem. I'm knitting merrily along on Kauni. Getting a row done here and another two there, generally feeling pretty good (I know that this is not killer progress by the standards of many knitters, but remember, sweaters are my nemesis, so I'm feeling pleased with any progress at all). I even started two-handed knitting (!!), and I'm kind of wondering whether I might start doing the left-handed yarn-control gig more often. As I knit, I take great pleasure in wondering which colors are going to come up next, so I look at those happy cakes of yarn I created to try to predict. And I tell you, I saw it coming: orange. Orange on the left side, orange on the right. And apparently, I'm the clown in the middle who is going to be wearing a sweater with one pattern repeat that isn't particularly distinguishable, because both balls came up orange. See for yourself:
See there at the top, where the pattern sort of fades out? That's not just overexposure because I'm taking the picture with the camera in my computer on the bar in my kitchen because I'm too darned lazy to wait for my camera to upload new photos (wow, I am SO going to make my students draw a sentence tree for that one!). That's orange, and lots of it. Of course, if I rip it back, I have to decide where in one of my balls of yarn I'm going to start, and worry about whether the colors will just come together again later. I'm tempted to stay with it as it is (the colors on one ball are moving towards yellow, and the other is headed for purple, so my torment should end soon). The whole point of this sweater was to mindlessly enjoy the color changes, taking what comes, even if I would never usually choose to juxtapose, say, purple and green. Or orange and, well, orange. Besides, after the week I've had, I don't think I can bear negative progress.

I'm having a similar dilemma with the Boudica socks. I think they're going to be too big around the arch of my foot. The question there is, rip and start over, or decrease now and figure that this is a custom fit, since my feet are, frankly, some of the widest feet ever across the ball (strange-looking, but very useful in doing balancing poses in yoga). I'm leaning towards the decrease option, not only because of the negative progress issue, but also because casting on for toe-up socks isn't my favorite thing to do. (Note the avoidance issues here; I'm trying to limit them to non-vital areas of my life, and I figure knitting is one of those -- no-one is going to die if my socks are a bit too big.)

So, on other fronts. The book club I belong to, in an attempt to make up for a run of books that we all, frankly, hated (the last one was so bad -- and by a nobel-prize winning author, no less! -- that I could NOT make myself read more than 120 pages, and I bitterly resented almost every one of those; I kept waiting hopefully for someone to kill off the main character -- I only found out later that someone does, at about page 200), has chosen to go a slightly different route, and we're reading The Golden Compass. We were all dithering, until I said (I've read the book before, but not for years -- since it came out), "I just want to LIKE a main character", and everyone said, "We'll like her, really?" and the vote was in. Is that sad? So, having seen the "find your daemon" function on Anne's blog, I told the group about it, and we've all agreed to find out before our next meeting, and then try to match daemons to members. My whole family did it, and it was kind of fun. Rick's is a spider (very much matches his engineering soul), Tess is a gibbon, and Kivrin is a hare. I put mine up on the blog for a while, for fun (a snow leopard), since no one in the group knows I have a blog and so won't find out before our next meeting. In any case, it's nice to look forward to reading a book for this group for a change.

Right now, I'm in mindless reading mode; it's good to get away from real life by reading a book where you can count on the author making everything come out right in the end. I'm also waiting for an order from Amazon -- I had to get a present for someone, and decided that, since I had free shipping, I should just get the EZ book I've been wanting, right? Maybe it'll come today...

I'm trying to enjoy my day at home, after this past week of hideousness. I spent several hours yesterday napping; I think I'm fighting off a head cold, and being stressed and losing sleep isn't helping (my big one right now is figuring out how I'm going to sleep 12 extra people in my house for one night, plus getting them all to and from the airport -- especially since we have to leave for the airport at 4:45 on a Saturday morning, and I just don't feel like I can ask many people to help with that!). So, this morning Rick kindly let me sleep in ('til 8:30 -- oh joy!; he even killed and cleaned up the ants who had invaded the pet food -- good man), and when I got up, I made cinnamon rolls.
They weren't pretty (they're a quick-bread version I found in the latest Fine Cooking, and the dough was a bit stickier than I'd anticipated), but clearly no one minded particularly. They're mostly gone now. The plan for the day: read two articles to prep for class; do laundry; make some soup for dinners during the week; roast some tomatoes to freeze; take a nap; knit a few more rows of Kauni to see what colors come up. Maybe read a little more mindless trash. Does this sound good?

Yes, it does.