Self denial

Ever wonder why some things in you house just break? They've worked properly for years and suddenly things just go bad. You really have no clue. Sure technology goes bad, but how does a cd player just stop recognizing cds? My cd player opens from the top. Press a button and the lid pops up so that you can place a cd on the spindle. Once you've done that all you have to do is close the lid with your hand and press play. It's so easy. The cd spins around and around at many revolutions a second trying to find the starting point and then just 'kaputs.' The cd isn't recognized and slowly the spinning dissolves into stopping. Sometimes, I can 'trick' the cd player into playing the cd by telling it to play the second or third song first and once it begins to play that song, I backtrack a listen to the cd from the beginning. Though it's still aggravating. Every time I jump through all those hoops just to play one stinking cd, I think to myself, Why would my cd player after years of faithful service do this to me? Then, the other day I discovered this:


Can a 6 to 8 pound cat smoosh a cd player? My denial says No, but Maya's face says Hell yes!

Speaking of Denial...I had been diligently working on my new SAFF jacket. In fact, for a while there I was just four inches shy of shaping the armholes. Yes, you read that right. I 'had been' 'for a while,' 'was' almost through the back of the jacket. I began to notice something was off near the beginning, but dismissed the thought almost immediately because I could not be wrong-I swatched. I checked my gauge with several needles. I even blogged about my swatch as proof I was a good knitter an I followed the rules. Apparently, even my swatches are off.


I was making a size 38" chest from a size 32.5" pattern for my 31" chest. DAMN! And I had already used up all those good episodes of House to blaze through over a foot of the back. The problem lies with the 3"/st I was getting instead of the 3.5"/st I was supposed to be getting (as you can see in the above picture). RIP, RIP, RIP.

So now I have cast on 13 less stitches and have only 6" completed, but I learned an important lesson. No matter what anyone tells you about gauge, or what you have ever hear about the importance of a trial sample. Never trust swatches those sneaky b@stards.