I started writing this blog post on March 1, 2011, and it presented an unwelcome opportunity to reflect on lessons learned.

It was supposed to be a reflection on what had happened in the past year since I wrote my inaugural blog post, about how I came to crochet, and a little bit about the woman who taught me.

But as I was attempting to upload a photo, bad database things began to happen. At first it slowed to a crawl, then it stopped. The blog host was called in the middle of the night. A case was opened. The database would be refreshed. It would take 15 minutes. An hour later the case was escalated. At two o’clock, sleep overtook me.

This morning, I no longer had the necessary permissions to access my blog. I wrote rude tweets and ate chocolate. Then later in the afternoon while my blog was still down, the internet service to my neighborhood was interrupted, and that is the point at which I surrendered, left the house, and got myself a diet coke.

But yesterday, while I sat through my son’s assorted lessons (he had both trumpet and Aikido), I crocheted and reflected on all that had happened in my crochet life this past year.

March entered like a lamb, and I started my day by continuing to work on organizing my crochet empire/guest room.

I got out the pile of longer yarn scraps from the previous day:

along with my H hook, and managed to untangle or unravel almost the entire pile and crochet it into my great-granny square before it was time for lunch.

In the time I had after lunch and before my son’s trumpet lesson, I turned by attention to a Square B-2 from the Granny Square Sampler afghan featured in Better Homes and Gardens Crocheting and Knitting. I had originally written a post about this square on April 8, 2010, and at the time I had included the directions for what I had done that differed from written directions in the book, but resulted in a square that much more closely resembled the one pictured in the book.

And my directions would have been perfect except that they weren’t, and I was not able to tell by looking what had been left out.

So with my copy of Better Homes and Gardens Knitting and Crocheting, along with the trusty 4.5 mm hook that has seen me through so much, my Red Heart Super Saver stash, and my completed Granny Sampler afghan where I could easily see it, I began to once again work square B-2, and in the process, I found my mistake.

It turned out that I had neglected to include the directions for what should have been round 5 of an 8 round granny square. Instead, I skipped right over it and then incorrectly labeled rounds 6, 7, and 8 as rounds 5, 6, and 7.

This time, however, I took reasonably good photos of how I worked the errant round that comes between rounds 4 and rounds 5:

After joining the new color with a sc into the stitch to the right of any ch-1 space from the previous round, work a second sc into the same stitch, *sc in next ch-1 space, 2 sc in next st, sc in each of the next 5 stitches, 2 sc in the next stitch*; repeat from * to* 3 times more, then sc in next ch-1 space, 2 sc in next st, sc in each of the next 5 stitches, join with a sl st to the first sc made. [50 sc]

I got to this point just in time to take a photo before we were off to the next thing which, as it happened was my son’s trumpet lesson.

I grabbed a skein of the vintage yarn I had purchased from his trumpet teacher two lessons ago:

my J hook, and started on another stash bag while my son worked on his scales and The Imperial March from the movie, Star Wars.

This is how far I had gotten by the time his lesson was over:

Then the database debacle happened, but at least for the moment the debacle has subsided. I have a few pictures that need to be restored on three days worth of posts, but it is, at least, manageable, and I finished the new stash bag and still have some chocolate hidden away, just in case.