king of the idiot savants

Sometimes, such as when a friend hands me knitting to fix, I feel like a knitting rockstar. I sure as hell don't know how to do everything, but I'm confident that I can learn anything I want to. (Except, it seems, how to deal with fucking laceweight without having a brain hemorrhage.)

Sometimes, however, I feel like a goddamned IDIOT who should just sell off all her supplies and twiddle her thumbs for a hobby. I was working on another Aveline hat, this one made out of my own handspun. Somewhere around the third row of the crown decreases, I realized something had gone wrong a few rows back. The nice

Here's what it's supposed to look like. From left to right: a k3, k2tog, yo, k2 sequence that alternates rows with plain knitting.


See? Perfectly goddamned simple, right? I had gorked something up between the k2tog and the yo a few rows back, so all I should have to do would be to drop the k2tog and the yo back the the original screwup, and knit the two stitches back up. IT TOOK AT LEAST HALF AN HOUR. I don't know what kind of idiot possessed my brain last night, but I couldn't get it right. I couldn't find the problem. Instead of a nice ladder of yarn waiting to be picked up and reknit, I had a crossed ladder, and I couldn't seem to see where the problem originated from. I glared at it and swore, and ripped back further, and finally realized there was a problem one stitch to the left and ripped THAT down and finally I had a neat uncrossed ladder of yarn and 3 stitches waiting to be picked up. Of course, I forgot the first crown increase, and had to rip back and fix that, but FINALLY it was fixed and looked indistinguishable from any other repeat.

I would just like to know WHY something perfectly simple took so long to fix -- a yo followed by a k2tog? Why was that hard? Why did I have to work so hard to fix it?