Today was both for me.

As I drank my first cup of coffee and gazed longingly through the window at my outdoor office, this was the view that greeted me:

Clearly, I was not going to be able to work outside today, but the state fair waits for no woman, so I could not let rain or the Monday-ness of it all get in the way of the work I needed to do. Chin up and ready to work on my project, I situated myself, all of the materials for my 2010 state fair project, and the project itself in the loft.

The disadvantage of working in the loft is that the light is bad; the advantage to working in the loft is that the cat is generally not motivated to climb the stairs. The result is an environment with substantially less cat hair than what is available downstairs where the light is better.

As it happened, the first order of business was sorting through the mess I had made of row 23. In my haste to write down the order in which I had laid out the motifs, I made two errors in my notations. The first error was when I incorrectly identified a square as having orchid as the outer round, when the outer round was purple. Time spent looking for something that was never there: more than I should have.

The second error was where I had the colors of the motif out of order (it should have read: white/cherry, but instead read cherry/white). This led to a series of errors that altogether (this includes making the mistake and then undoing all of the subsequent mistakes that followed from it) took about 35 minutes.

However, I persisted and got row 23 pieced together before lunch, and then joined to row 22 as seen here:

Like water running through my fingers, the rest of the afternoon slipped away from me.