I’m in the middle of this. So far whenever my computer thumps it’s e-mail announcement, my stomach lurches, I run over to it, and try to immediately fix the whatever it is. Umm, Chris, you are acting so silly.
I think I’ve just about used up my attention to detail, especially as I balanced the checkbook last night, discovered that I’ve accidentally had two different spreadsheets all year with the same title in two different folders, and that not all the information was in one place. So I re-balanced the whole thing from January (I’m SO glad this is only March) and discovered that someone in California used our debit card last week to buy tickets for $473.67. The bank and Pay Pal have it all straightened out now, it only took DH on the phone for 15 min last night, and 10 min in the branch office this morning. So, umm, details? Yeah.
It is not hard for me to see pictures of interesting knitted things, then send them to a chart for my fingers. Writing them down and getting the details right is something else entirely! I didn’t actually think I could do it at all, until I pretended I was knitting in my head, then wrote down what I did. And I did it in sentences, not code, because mental knitting was hard enough. The testers have been unanimous that code is easier to read, So following one of their suggestions, I translated what I had from "Knit 9 stitches with the main color, twist yarns together on the knit side of the fabric’ to ‘MC k9.’ Now I wonder why I didn’t do that before asking for testers. It’s actually like writing a computer program after writing comments about what you want to accomplish, which takes some of the anxiety out of it.
Next time I will make my chart, type the whole thing out again in sentence form, then let it sit over night. Then I’ll read it over, trim it down again, THEN ask the testers to have a go.
And when we are working on it, I will try to remember that I can fix it later, the comments are most likely not going to fall out of cyberspace (of course, when I start doing this for money, I had better get a secondary way to access the internet going, but anyway.) So far we’ve trimmed the 6 pages (yeah, for a dishcloth!) down to 4.
As Madeleine L’Engle quoted from Annon in A Circle of Quiet,
Should be clean as bone,
Clear as light,
Firm as stone.
Two words are not
As good as one.
And knitting patterns are better short.
Or, as Mark Twain wrote, "Sorry I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write you a short one."
Blessings,
Annie