Not Out of the Woods Yet:

Day 75 : I'm afraid it's not looking good for our Olympic hopeful. Last seen meandering about the trees and muttering to herself something about not letting this thing getting the better of her and, I'll show them all and, it ain't over 'til it's over or something to that effect, our delusional knitter seeking to find her way clear through the murky grey of the forest path stole has stepped unwittingly into the unknittingly bog.
In a misguided attempt to shave some time off her knitting time the knitter made the fateful decision to leave the unused stitches of the entrelac panels on a double point needle and risked dropping stitches off the ends of the needles instead of properly transferring the stitches to a proper stitch holder and thusly fell into a trap of her very own making. The knitter entangled herself in a grey web of extra fine merino wool, unmade from her own self conceit.

"So what if a stitch does slip off the end of one of the needles. It's not that terrible, you've dropped stitches before. It shouldn't be that hard to pick it up again, right?"

Right.
Well, uhm, wrong, wrong, wrong, oh, SO WRONG.

The Ripple Effect:

Apparently when it comes to this shawl, and this knitter, dropping a stitch from the needle proved to be no little problem. Did you know that dropping a stitch from the holder has the same effect on the knitted object as that the dropping of a pebble has on a still pond? Ripples of unknitting began to spread out from that one single dropped stitch; wave upon wave the stitches began unraveling its way through the center of the shawl.
This was no laughing matter, especially at 3:00 a.m. when the knitter caught in the throws of her own special demented madness, desperately struggled to stem the tide of unknitting that was spreading like a cancer through the shawl, eating away the hours and hours of earnest knitting effort. In a moment of despair the knitter began to believe that there was no hope and that she had no choice but to rip it back two whole tiers, which nearly brought her to hysterical tears.
Oh, you would too if it was nearly dawn and you were covered in fine gray mist of tangled yarn from obsessively compulsively ripping apart your knitting, and wishing to high heaven that with every stitch that came undone that you could make yourself stop but knew you couldn't.

Good thing this isn't a race. I mean, boy, this could really have a negative effect on the outcome. Seriously, how embarrassing would it be to be the last to cross the finish line? I'd hate to be that loser.... Why are you laughing? You shouldn't be laughing. Oh, just go away and leave me alone.

The Center Holds:

In the end only four of the sections of entrelac were lost as she struggled to bring the de construction to a halt and find some semblance of sanity a reasonable point of return. This may not seem like that many panels but when each panel takes about an hour to knit it was lost time a plenty.
Reconstruction has begun, but it's slow going and as you can well imagine the knitter is presently grieving the loss of progress on her stole and is currently working her way through the differing stages of grief: denial, anger, sadness and acceptance. Presently the anger has faded and has been replaced with sadness. (which three days of rain has done little to improve)

Presently the Grey Lady rests at the bottom of my knitting pile waiting to be resurrected. She will be... one day, just not today and probably not tomorrow, but one day.

Pooh, did you know there were frogs in the forest?