You know that moment, when you have a dozen pressing tasks to attend to, and suddenly the most minute issue, one that has been lingering at the very bottom of your list for months, suddenly becomes The Most Important Issue To Address?

That was me today.  I crocheted a loop onto a potholder I knitted in 2013.  I’ve known since I finished it that it would benefit from a loop, so I can hang it on the fridge with its crocheted potholder friends, but suddenly, this afternoon, crocheting that loop became essential to my continued existence.

I felt a little better once I had added that tidy little loop, but when I was digging around in my scrap bin for some yarn to crochet the loop I had unearthed the 200-odd yards of laceweight merino that has been a tangled mess since I finished my little linen Icarus shawl in 2011.  I don’t have any photographic documentation, but I spent an hour detangling that yarn.  (Yes, I am the sort of person who untangles laceweight merino.  There’s a very good chance I was a terrier in my former life.)  I got about halfway done before I realized I hadn’t seen Eloise in a while, and had a moment of panic wondering how she had entertained herself for so long.

Miraculously, she was taking a nap, not destroying all the yarn I hold dear (her other favorite hobby), but while I was downstairs looking for her, I saw the shawl my grandma had sent back to me for mending a shamefully long time ago.  Incidentally, it is also an Icarus.  The spell of delicious unknotting had been broken, and I have been feeling quite guilty about not mending the the moth hole in this shawl.

So yes, that became imperative to fix too.

See the little blip in the top right corner?  Not my tidiest mending job, but the merino is nice and fuzzy and should stick to itself to keep things in place.  As an aside, I have had the little knob of leftover yarn from this shawl floating in my stash for over seven years, and I am so glad.  Matching this gray-blue color, not to mention the fiber content and single ply, would have been a nightmare.  I basically would have had to buy another skein of Malabrigo Lace for the half-yard I needed to fix the hole.  Crisis averted.

After I folded up my grandma’s Icarus and tucked it in a box for shipping, I was so far into the sea of minutiae that I figured now was as good a time as any to update my Ravelry library and put a few rounds on the Pi Shawl that has become a permanent fixture in the living room.  Perhaps with these little details out of the way, I can get back to the items at the top of my to-do list tomorrow, because there are a few things that I’m going to need a weekend-sized chunk of time to get done.

What about you, readers?  What unexpected items have you crossed off your to-do lists recently?