Well, I gave it a valiant effort, but in the end I fell short.

The start was strong, but ultimately, the finishing was my downfall.

When the cauldron went dark, although I had four booties off the needles and wearable, two of them did not have faces or ears. (The ears were all knit, but not pieced together or on the second pair of socks.)

Some days your best just isn’t enough.

As Rudi (accurately but somewhat cruelly) noted, I took one too many naps last week.

As a consolation, I did manage to knit a hat, sixteen ears, and four booties in the last fourteen days in addition to traveling to St. Louis, working my company’s annual meeting, baking a birthday cake. And taking a whole bunch of naps.

And although I spent almost all of today indoors, I did take a break yesterday in order to do some grocery shopping, enjoy the beautifully warm weather, notice the spring flowers, and eat my first ice cream cone of the season.

It’s disappointing that I didn’t finish knitting the booties the way I wanted to before the end of the Olympics. But the premise was to challenge myself to go above and beyond what I’d done before. And I definitely feel that I did succeed in that regard: I knit something I’d never made before and ended up redesigning the pattern for half the project.

But now I’m going to do what any good Olympian should do after her event is over: have a hot cup of tea, hit the showers, and head to bed.

Congrats to all those Olympians who did finish! You’re inspiring!

With just over twelve hours to go, I could be in trouble…

I have three booties that are off the needles and one more that requires about another hour’s worth of knitting more.

Two of those booties are still flat, looking no more like a bootie than you or I.

Well, maybe a little closer. But not much.

I still have to:

• Finish bootie #4.
• Seam booties #1 and 2 (or 2 and 3, depending on how we think of them).
• Knit eight more mousie ears. (Last night’s attempt to knit seven mousie ears on one needle was as much a failure as Apollo Anton Ohno’s attempt at passing on the outside in his first Torino race. Luckily, he won gold in his last solo race of the games to give me heart. I’m sure that I was his personal motivator.)
• Sew sixteen mousie ears into eight pairs.
• Sew eight mousie ear pairs onto four mousie socks
• Embroider four mousie eyes and four mousie noses (with whiskers) onto four mousie socks.
• Block four mousie socks.

Excuse me; I now have a stomach-ache.

Where’s Gramma when I need her?

Update: With less than six hours to go until the flame goes out, the only thing on the above list that has been accomplished is to get the fourth sock off the needles. Nearly two hours were lost when I made a beginner’s mistake of putting down the needles and picking them up heading the other direction. Not sure why I didn’t notice that mistake until five rows in, but that’s how it goes some days. Particularly days when you’re on a deadline. Not sure I’m going to make it…