Frog pond

It seems that's where all of my projects are going these days. Perhaps if I could count to 80 (or 16, or 5) consistently I wouldn't have to rip out so much. Or maybe, just maybe, if swatches didn't lie. My knitting karma just isn't lately and I've fallen back to the old standby project. Socks. I'm knitting a girlfriend a pair because she kindly picked up girlchild from kindergarten yesterday and kept her because youngest boy child needed surgery and neither my husband nor myself could figure out how we could be in two places at one time. I'll post pictures once the socks are finished (if I remember). I've tried about a dozen times to knit a shawl. Print o the wave. I was rewinding the yarn (laceweight) when it flew off of the winder. I had a fit and threw the mess across the room. The husband fetched it, untangled and rewound the mess and banned me from knitting it for a while (I told him to just throw the mess away). I'm sure that didn't make the yarn Gods happy and I'll have to cast on that stole/shawl at least another dozen times before I manage to remember how to count to 80 more than 5 times. I'm just hoping to keep it out of the frog pond when I decide to (once again) cast it on.