Last night, he hadn’t said anything, so I figured yonder blogminder hadn’t read the blog. So I opened the conversation as we sat down to dinner, with, “My pet gopher died today.”

You should have seen his face! “Your *WHAT*?!!!?”

And then we quickly moved on to other things. I’m posting these amaryllises in memoriam to the little animal. Richard did make a comment that had me suddenly realizing that the gardeners who come for maybe an hour a month happened to have come Tuesday, and they’d probably poisoned it. I once caught them spraying weeds between me and the neighbors, and I’d made it clear, I thought, that there was to be no poison in my yard. I guess they didn’t think that applied to gophers?

What I had been going to blog about yesterday before it showed up and acted cute was a tutorial on how to chop off lace without screaming and running. I had this project in Kidsilk Haze and Merino Oro that I’d started off doing, the Crohn’s flare had wiped me out, I’d put it down for most of a week and then when I’d picked it up I’d continued it *in the wrong pattern* without noticing until it was almost to a finished length. And then it suddenly hit me what I’d done. Oh my.

I was spending too much time outside in the sun yesterday, something I really can’t risk, which is one of the reasons I grabbed the kid and we went to Karen’s shop instead. While we were there, I mentioned about the goofed project and how I was going to just cut it off two rows before the change and undo it backwards just a bit from there and then cast off that end. When you’re frogging backwards, you have to pull the yarn through the last stitch in the row every time, which is a very good reason not to unravel the whole section in one uninterrupted strand.

Another customer in there immediately responded with an idea that should have been obvious to me: “Make it a pattern!”

I thought about it: she was right! The scarf was not quite long enough to call it done; all I had to do was repeat that beginning section at the other end. The midsection was similar enough anyway that a non-knitter might not even ever notice.

And now that I’ve done exactly that and liked it, the funny thing is that I’m sitting here debating which yarn and needles to repeat the whole scarf with to make the contrast show up more. It needs to be a denser knit. I like it!