Hey there! It’s Thursday night, which means it’s time to review three of the beautiful things from the previous week:

1. Between storms, pastel clouds dash across the sky as if late to an Impressionist’s canvas.

2. We cook out for Rudi’s birthday party, and he and I tend the grill on the breezy evening. Our hair smells pleasantly of campfire smoke all night.

3. We head to the Thai embassy for the afternoon, where they entertain us with feats of skill and delicious food. Rudi eats a papaya salad and I opt, at his suggestion, for mango sticky rice. Did you know they make it sticky with coconut milk? Yum!

How about you? What was beautiful in your life last week?

I am down to the toe on the Sock Madness socks I’ve been working on for the past month (being eliminated slows down the knitting immensely, I’ve found), which means it’s time to return to the project I was working on before the last pattern was announced.

This was a long lingering UFO (unfinished object), dating back to my first year of participating in the Tour de France knitalong. I knit the first sock during the Tour of 2008 and then inexplicably put them aside, despite a love of the yarn, Lazy Perry Ranch, and a fondness for the pattern, Bastille Day.

Suddenly this spring, I needed to finish this pair of socks and picked up the needles and cast on Sock #2. I knit it intermittently in between Sock Madness rounds, and I can only say that the stop-and-go nature may have had a detrimental effect on my project.

See how I’m nearly done? Less than an inch to go…

The knitting went quickly, although I was grumpy about how the yarn was suddenly pooling on the leg. I figured my gauge had changed over time, and ripped back to the heel in order to try to actively knit differently in order to keep the yarn from looking hideous. You can see from the above photo of the sock fronts that it’s clearly still different, but not too bad.

Unless you turn the sock over and look at the backs:

Yep. I managed to knit the leg of my second sock not once, but twice, in the wrong pattern. The front of the leg remains the same pattern as on the foot, but the back is supposed to have a different pattern. I remember reading that when I put the sock down at one point, but clearly neglected to revisit the instructions (or even the first sock!) when I picked it up again.

Third time is the charm right? I mean, after three years and three times knitting the leg, this pair of socks is going to be awesome. I can just sense it.