Shawl-along, little doggy

I started the shawl knit-along last Thursday. The goal--average 7 rows per day. Not necessarily knit exactly 7 rows per day, as we know that sometimes time and motivation are in short supply, just an average. Things seemed to be going swimmingly. I knit on the beach, in the car, through various episodes of Top Gear. I was well ahead of the goal, averaging about 12 rows a day. Drunk off of my own shawl prowess, I laughed in the face of lifelines. Then, last night, I realized my stitch count was off. Curious. Here's what I had so far:

Ohhh yeah. But something seemed awry in general, minus the extra stitch. I found it difficult throughout to check for errors; making a bunch of holes in the material seems like mistakes to begin with. But it looks good, right? Let's go in for an aerial view:

Mmmm hmm. That's hot shawl action. Wait a tick. What's this?

I think the technical term for this is 'zigging when you should have zagged' It's also the cause of the oversized hole to the left of the zig). So I hyperventilated for a while, and then decided that I could probably just drop the stitches down and fix it. I still had a nagging sense of unease, though. I thought I'd been following the recipe pretty well, but this error was uniformly repeated. Looking for mistakes on this thing is like looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures, and all of a sudden it came into focus:

Crap. The whole pattern shifts to the left at the green line. So I invented some new words, or at least some new arrangements of words, and made a few suggestions to the shawl that are probably anatomically impossible. I threatened to punch Martha Waterman in the face:


I will snap your stupid glasses in half. Lord, we all had those glasses back in the '90s, eh? Can I get a high-five? No? I mean, I didn't have them either.
Yarn post-mortem:


It got much worse than this, but I got too depressed to snap a photo.

I'm a bit off my goal now...my shawl is half the yarn it used to be. Blurg!