Partner sweater countdown

I managed to finish the Body of the Partner Sweater this morning (two sleeves left).  I started binding it off last night.  I chose a bind-off that is supposedly lovely and stretchy.  Perfect, I thought, to finish the ribbing at the bottom of this sweater without losing the lovely stretchiness of the bottom ribbing.  I got halfway through the binding-off last night, and with hands cramping, I left it and went to bed.  

When I woke up this morning, I decided I didn’t like the way that bind-off looked.  It was sort of thick, and sort of forced the ribbing to splay in an unattractive way.  So I undid it.  

Undoing has been the hardest thing for me to learn in knitting.  Not that it’s hard.  Undoing is often much much easier than the original doing.  That was the case for this ribbing.  But undoing is psychologically very hard for me.  I mean, I spent an hour on those ninety bind-off stitches (that sounds crazy-long to me too, but it’s true).  I could take it out in less than ten minutes and that work was pfffft! gone forever.  

I used to hate undoing so much—even when I had made ugly mistakes in the knitting—that I’d figure out ways to fix or hide or ignore rather than undo and redo.  I have left knitting sitting in my closet for months, years even, with a mistake or an unsatisfying bit of knitting, because I was paralyzed with a lack of wanting to undo.  

I have come to realize in my advancing age (can you hear my creaking rocking chair?) that the part I love most about knitting, though, is the actual knitting.  You know, the part where I’m sitting here knitting.  Making one loop of yarn after another in tidy little rows and rounds and columns.  So, I figure, undoing something (which has lovely little names like Ripping, Frogging, Tinking, or just plain old Un-Knitting), just gives me the opportunity to do more of the part that I love when I get to do it over.  

Plus, seriously, if I’m going to spend hours and hours and hours making something that will hang out in my life or the life of someone I love for a long time, I should take the time to make it right.  Compared to the time invested in knitting the whole garment, the Redos don’t usually add up to much (I say usually, because I know that there have been times when I’ve had to completely undo something because a mistake occurred wayyyyyy back at the beginning, or because the thing turned out wayyyyy too small or too big—and don’t talk to me about too small right now, because this sweater is just almost too small for Partner, but I refuse to undo it completely because I really like it, and if it doesn’t end up fitting him after I block it [which it should because the swatch I made at the beginning did the same thing, loosening up tremendously when I washed it], then it’s mine).  

(Go ahead.  Tell me to quit with the parentheses already.)

So on the sweater, I undid the fancy bind-off (which might still be good for binding off lace, but which I will not use for ribbing again), and started over, doing my usual bind-off on bigger needles to make sure the bottom edge didn’t bind up.  And guess what?  I love it.  It’s perfect.  The bind-off just sort of disappears into that bottom ribbing.  

Now, the question remains, can I meet my goal?  Can I knit two sleeves in three days in order to finish this sweater before the Olympics start?  Actually, less than three days depending on whether I count until the Olympics actually start in Beijing (which would be Friday morning at 7 a.m. for me, what with the 13-hour time difference between here and Beijing) or when the start will be televised for me, which is sometime Friday night.  Either way, the chances are slim.  

So what am I still doing sitting here typing, parenthetically no less?