Frogging my day away...

For the two of you who have never heard of frogging in the context of knitting: to 'frog' is to unravel large portions of your knitting in a rather quick way--you 'rip-it, rip-it'. [har, har, ugh].

Sometimes frogging is necessary or advisable when things just aren't going right with a design or a yarn, or when we just can't bear to complete some despised project. Depending on the circumstances, it can be either torture or liberation.

It can also be great fun to frog something to which you have little attachment in front of a non-knitter and watch the horror spread across his or her face. If at first they marveled at you creative handiwork, they will boggle at its seeming wanton destruction.

Frogging came to my mind today in a completely different context. I spent many hours today calibrating equipment in the lab with another postdoc before we realized that one of the connecting cables wasn't completely plugged in, thereby invalidating an entire day's worth of work. It was as if my workday had been frogged back to its cast-on edge and I was left with nothing. [sigh]. Tomorrow, we'll have to start over from the beginning and hopefully get it right this time.

No frogging in my knitting though. I've started the first sleeve of Mandalay and I'm also trying to make progress on the tumbling block afghan again. The afghan is a gift and needs to be done by the end of August, so I'm going to have to make sure I spend a little time on it every day, even if I would rather be working on Mandalay instead.