Today was a very productive sock knitting day. I started knitting the toe-up sock last night with Opal Southwestern Sock Yarn in Color#5. At work today, no one was around for lunch, so I was able to spend a few minutes working on the sock.

I had anticipated a bleak afternoon of repetitive tasks while working to populate a "public" document with pieces of information from a "private" document. A couple of years ago, my coworker and I had to configure and test approximately 1200 Cisco 2924 Ethernet switches within a rather short time frame. We looked around on the Internet and found the software Macro Express. It's a comprehensive macro-building software package that saved us a considerable amount of time. We were able to cut the time it took to power up, configure, restart and power down a switch from about 5 minutes to about 30 seconds thanks to this software. Based on those memories, I tracked down the software and built a macro to move between the spreadsheets, making the appropriate copy and pastes, and automate the tiresome work which I was expecting to have to do over a day or so. What do you know - I was able to finish up in a few hours! Best of all, while the macro was running in a loop, I was able to work on my sock some more! The afternoon turned out to be enjoyable and this little sock is moving along nicely.

I also recommend trying the toe-up sock-knitting method. I was a bit intimidated by it initially, but jumped right in and found that it was not difficult at all. There are some excellent directions in various free patterns on the web (listed below). I now see why people are so loyal to this method:

1. No need to kitchener stich (or use some other grafting method) to finish the toe. (although once I got it, I began to think that the kitchener stitch was kind of fun)

2. Because the toe is created by making increases, you have excellent control over the width of the foot of the sock.

3. It's easy to try the sock on to check how it fits.

4. You can end the sock when you decide - either when you run out of yarn or at a pre-defined length.

...I may find even more benefits as I go along.

Links to Toe-Up Sock Patterns:
Toe-Up Sock class on Socknitters.com
Flor's Toe-Up sock directions
Pine Tree Toe up socks from wiseneedle.com
Judy Gibson's "You're Putting Me On" socks