That’s me. I just want to smack somebody, anybody, which generally isn’t considered good manners, especially when it’s not anybody in particular that I’m crabby about. John says he definitely doesn’t volunteer to be the smackee, though he was nice enough to say he’d make me a martini for cocktail hour tonight, so I guess he wouldn’t be on the smackee list anyway. The dogs are looking a bit nervous, though Willie’s not nervous, he knows that any respectable cat wouldn’t stand for being smacked.
Let’s see, what am I crabby about? Let’s start with being sick again. I’ve had some sort of bronchitis bug all week. I was at a medical meeting the last part of last week, started feeling crappy on Sunday, fortunately had Monday off. Went to work Tuesday feeling sick, had to take yesterday off since I couldn’t talk except to squeak. John nearly got smacked for laughing at my squeaking. I had today off, which was a good thing, but I have to work the weekend and tomorrow. Fortunately I’m feeling better, and I don’t sound like so much like a demented mouse anymore.
Then there were technology issues. I seem to have lost the camera cord and spare battery, fortunately I found a spare cord so I can upload photos from my camera. Then I lost my sunglasses, which may not seem like a big deal in the Pacific NW in October, but the sun does actually shine here at times. I found them today, in a case, in my bag, right where they should have been. Weird.
The big techno glitch is our cable TV. We have a Tivo DVR, which is only a month old. The old one gave up the ghost while we were in Scotland, we think it might have been a power surge when we lost electricity for a bit, but who knows. Of course it was just dead, so we couldn’t recover anything we’d recorded while we were gone, including the first couple episodes of all the fall shows I had lined up to watch. No big deal, we caught up with them online, mostly, and set up the new Tivo that they sent us. We’ve been a bit busy this past couple of weeks and haven’t watched much television, and sat down night before last to catch up a bit. Of course there are now about 16 hours of new shows that we’re behind on. We were in the middle of an episode of The Good Wife (great show, by the way), and poof, the TV goes off, and Tivo starts to reboot. After much swearing and messing around with it, it turns out the the NEW Tivo box has died as well, and all the episodes of everything we had recorded are toast toast toast. Crabby crabby crabby. The Tivo guy on the phone today has no idea how close he came to being smacked.
Last but not least is the knitting. Medical conferences are great for knitting! So I finished the Little Devil red socks I’ve been working on for about a hundred years. Here they are:
Done! Then I tried them on, they are too fracking short. It just wouldn’t be a Knitting Doctor post without screwed up knitting, now, would it? I stuffed them back into the bag until I got home and could deal with them. Who knows, maybe they would become longer with a little time out. Not so much. So in a fit of pique, I grabbed my scissors and cut off the very end of the kitchener graft on both of them. John was horrified. I got the first one ripped back to before the toe decreases and back on the needles. So they’re not done after all. More crabby.
The other crabby crabby crabby knitting thing is that flipping True Blood Faery sweater. This pattern is making me crazy for many reasons, which I won’t go into just now, but the sleeves are one of them. The initial pattern was just in a few smaller sizes, and the designer, who at the moment is on my smackee list, sort of jerry-rigged the larger set of sizes, but never actually finished writing it up. The sleeves were never finished in the larger size range, but the armscye measurement for the next size smaller is the same, so I figured I’d just use those instructions to knit the sleeves. After I got about a foot of sleeve done, I realized that this is just a mess. Several other people who have knitted this pattern have had to rewrite the sleeves, since the way she’s written it ends up with huge balloon sleeves at the underarm, not a look that is flattering to anybody, especially not me. Here’s a photo. The blue green sweater underneath is a Peace Fleece cardigan that I did a ways back. I mostly wear it as a jacket, and the sleeves are plenty big around under the arm to fit over anything I might need to wear under it.
It might not look so bad just now, but I still have  10 sets of increases to go, so that sleeve will be 20 more stitches around in circumference by the time I hit the underarm. Damn.  I’ll rip it back to just before the cables, and plan to dust off my sweater wizard software and come up with a different game plan. Crabby crabby crabby.
The not crabby part?
I have a pot of homemade bean soup on the stove! I have a sweet husband who loves me! I get to knit all those sleeve cables again! I love knitting cables! And I almost forgot to show you two of the things I bought in Scotland! Here they are:
Every Queen needs a pencil with a crown on it. And a God Save The Queen mug to drink her tea from.
Last but not least, I have a good job, and that means that I don’t have to knit for a living, which is a good thing, all things considered.
Oh thank you for posting your crabby list. I’m so relieved to know I’m not the only crabby one this week.
Love that mug!
It is good to remember the good stuff, like the job and the wonderful husband, when the other stuff goes south. I am currently knitting a sleeveless sweater that would have been done a month ago if I had bnever had to rip out any of it. As it is I slightly over half done with the yoke. Dumbass knitting mistakes indeed…
I have an idea – quit hanging around sick people! Then you won’t get sick so much. Let me know how that works out. : p
As the old John Denver song goes – somedays are diamonds, some days are stone. Count your blessings (as I’m sure you do) that you have wonderful John to make you a martini and your hobby is a form than can be frogged, no matter how painful that may be. Bill reminds me of that when he makes a wrong cut woodworking. No recovering that!
Wow! Sounds like a horrid day (or couple of days.) Bummer! Besides the beans, martini and your husbie, you can also be glad that your too short socks are top down, and not toe up. That would be a lot harder to fix.
I think I have the same cold, It is not that bad, but it’s just not going away.
Hey- none of that’s anything a nice strong martini can’t fix! And maybe a good night’s sleep.
Everything will look better in the morning.
Reading all that just made me crabby (not really)!
Gee, I’ve had days/weeks like that. I don’t get sick much at all (thank goodness) but I understand the Crabby! I like the diamonds/stones comment, I had forgotten that song. Might have to dust off some albums and give JD a listen…
One stitch at a time.
Oh, my goodness….poor Lorette! So sorry about all the stuff going wrong in your life at the moment…. Things will get better in time. And thank God for John and your pets…you are lucky to have them and their love. I can relate to the knitting problems….ugh!!!!!
Here’s hoping things improve, starting with your bean soup and this evening’s martini…
I came home from NOLA with some sort of bronchial thing, so I can completely sympathize.
My sympathies, and it seems you have every right to be crabby. I, too, am in the re-knitting process on a Christmas stocking for my new grandson. One knits it top down, but I look at the pattern as if it were toe up (as in I look at the pattern with Santa’s face right side up. Am now knitting Santa’s hat for the 4th time!! At this rate, it will NEVER be finished for Christmas 2011.
Sorry you are under the weather! Your devil socks are beauteous. Hope you feel better soon.
We all have the crabbies at one time or another, and being sick makes everything worse. And the sweater sleeve would drive me crazy, too. Grrr.
Crabby day’s are allowed! Sounds like that is one of those days you just-stop what your doing, accept that nothing will get done, crawl into bed with some of those pink tiger striped socks and think ‘tomorrow will be better’ BUT in reality.. sometimes you just can’t stop 😉 but amazing how wonderful served soup can melt everything away esp. served from your hubby!
Sounds like you have plenty to be crabby about – but didn’t crabbing about it make you feel a hair better? I am on my 3rd & 4th Tivos. I have one for the living room & one for upstairs. The first couple lasted about 4 years & then one of them just sort of died. John said tat, since they are just dedicated computers, that’s not unexpected. Since it was near my birthday, he bought me 2 “new” TiVos (rebuilt because TiVo no longer has a DVR contract with Direct TV). I had tried the Direct TV DVR (which is what they give you if your Tivo dies) &, compared to TiVo, it majorly sucked. One thing I do is TiVo certain actors & you can’t do that on a Direct TV DVR. TiVo (or Direct TV) does seem to hiccup occasionally. Only half that episode of The Good Wife (one of my favorite shows) was recorded on the living room TiVo. Fortunately, I set BOTH TiVos to record my favorite shows & the full episode was on the upstairs TiVo. I won’t even try to figure out how that happened! Love the pencil!
Oh we all deserve our crabby moments. I love the tea mug. It would cheer almost anyone up. Hope you’re back to 100% soon.
Aww. That is really too bad about the TIVO. I had a similar problem with the DirecTV DVR, and I lost all the foreign movies I had stockpiled–and I was surprisingly irked as well. What truly pisses me off is how CBS (at least on the East Coast) will screw up its Sunday lineup if football runs late, so I never know when to start recording The Good Wife (yes, I am not a football fan).
As for the knitting, that is truly awful about the sleeve. And I’m not sure I’d ever do that to a pair of socks. You are intrepid.
Sounds like you need some martini reinforcements to help the day get better!
Cocktail hour seems an excellent idea. I hope you get back to normal quickly and get to enjoy the next day off.
Hope tomorrow is better for you. The soup sounds yummy. Enjoy knitting the cables!!