A Sock With an Agenda

This sock has it in for me. After all the attention and almost monogamous knitting I've given to it, you'd think it would be grateful. Loving. Appreciative. But no. It hates me. How do I know it hates me? Let me enumerate.

1. No matter how I twist the stitches, I still wind up with holes where I picked up the instep.
2. The first time I finished it, including grafting the end, it was too short. The above picture is at the point in the pattern where I am supposed to decrease for the toe. Really?
3. The second time I finished it, it was still too short.
4. It makes my hands hurt. Normal yarn doesn't do that so easily.
5. I set a goal of finishing the PAIR by November 29. It's trying to drag me down.

I think it knows I put brown in contention, along with orange, for my least favorite colors. I thought I had disguised my, at best, ambiguity towards that color by giving it a sweet name: Chocolate Kisses. Clearly, it's on to me. I think it's time I take it out into the woods and have a little "hunting accident," never mind that I don't hunt. Maybe a "hiking accident."
Speaking of hiking, I'm up to 97 geocaches found--almost to my first milestone of 100. One of the most recent was amazing: Pirate Landing. The cacher went over the top on this one: burlap and leaves were glued to the top of the container and the whole thing had a serious pirate theme. Very cool!
And then there are hiking socks: these are the ones I knitted from Wick: 49% soy yarn. I must be wearing them a lot because I'm washing 'em every week. They're comfortable inside my hiking boots and my walking shoes. And Tiny said, "Those look like real socks." That's success.