If I'm going to have to rip out another effing row on the neckline on my effing sweater, I swear I'm going to toss the effing thing on the bonfire I'm going to build in our backyard. What do you mean "Well, it's your first attempt at an actual garment and you did abandon the pattern after the first three rows"? That's not the point!

The bonfire I'm going to build will consist solely of good intentions gone awry: my copy of James Joyce's "Ulysses" that I took with me across the North Sea in the misguided belief that I'd read it (and left my vintage Georgette Heyer novels in the discard pile while I was at it); the tins of dry yeast that have been sitting in my cupboard for a long, long time waiting for my bread-making to re-ignite; the clothes I was going to mend last summer but haven't; the plants I forgot to water after having declared 2007(!) the year I was going back to have plants in my home. Let's not go into my decision to re-reinvent cabbage.

Okay, maybe the sweater will not go the way of the plants or the culinary plans. Knitting continues to astonish me - not just the process of taking a string of X material, looping it in various ways using fancy sticks and ending up with a textile, but also the actual community surrounding fiber arts and crafts. I may be frustrated by a sweater refusing to shape up exactly as I had envisioned it, but the frustration is countered by warm and witty encouragement from the knitting community.

Just three more rows of moss seed stitch and I swear this'll be it. Grrr..

PS. I have actually begun reading again! Hooray!