One of my endearing/annoying habits when watching television shows or movies at home is to grab the Tivo remote and use it to go back and view (and review) any and all crochet that I see, and that is exactly what happened while I was watching CSI which for me ended up being a crochet scene investigation.

I spent much of the morning struggling to decide which color to use in the third round of several granny squares I was working on for my Go-go granny dress to be. Instead of finishing any one four-round square, I ended up making an ever increasing number of two-round squares that needed to be completed.

It was while I was ruminating over color choices and combinations, that I took a few moments to read the news. In that time, I came across the article “Why So Many Can’t Make Decisions” from the Wall Street Journal about the role of ambivalence in the decision making process. As a person who could accurately be described as falling into the “high ambivalence” group, I was hoping that there would be some nugget in the article that would help me do an end run around my tendency to consider (and reconsider) all options.

Alas, while it was an interesting article that ultimately suggested that people who see the world in shades of gray could write a list of pros and cons, and then (if that was not of sufficient help) go with their gut, I was not able to implement any of the ideas I came across in the article into a workable way to select colors.

To that end, I grabbed the remote, turned on the television, and watched an episode of Jerry Bruckheimer’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation that I had found particularly humorous, but what caught my attention was not the “crime scene” aspect of it, but rather the “crochet scene” that was buried within.

The episode, “Ending Happy“, originally aired in 2007. The story takes place in a bordello where the owner of the bordello has bought out the contract of a hasbeen boxer known as “Happy.”

Happy’s life is anything but, and he does little to endear himself to anyone, save the bordello owner’s wife. The result is that Happy is found floating in the bordello pool, and the crack team of Las Vegas crime scene investigators is dispatched to find the evidence that will lead to an answer as to who killed Happy.

Wo while early in the investigation the characters of Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle are shown walking from the bordello to the trailer where Happy lived while they survey the crime scene, I could not help but notice the crochet scene. While Sara wears dark glasses to shield her eyes from the sun, Grissom wears a straw hat that is, as it happens, crocheted. Grabbing the Tivo remote, I went back several times to see if I could learn more about how the hat was crocheted and what materials were used to crochet it, but I was not able to ascertain anything else about the construction of the hat.

The episode is engaging on many levels, and to my great relief, it seemed to have engaged the part of my brain that was refusing to make a decision about which colors to use. By the time the show had ended, I had managed to complete two four-round squares which while in the larger scheme of things is not that munificent, it was, at the very least, forward progress.