I'm in a never ending sea of UFOs

Well my last post (i know it was a while ago) involved me starting my first sock and turning the heel and that was basically it. Well in all this time I've got a bit of the instep/sole done and that's it, still on the first sock and to be honest i think it'll end up getting frogged anyway. I received a book for Christmas that is so far looking great. It's 2-at-a-time Socks by Melissa Morgan-Oakes. It's a technique that involves (quite obviously) knitting 2 socks at the same time, however this technique only involves one circular rather than the more common method requiring 2. This appeals to me because it seems to make more sense but also because now I don't need to invest in a second set of needles (at least for the smaller sizes) just to make socks, which frankly I'm not sure yet if I'm even going to knit all that many pairs of them anyway. Before owning the book or hearing anything about it I toyed with the idea of coming up with a method to figure out doing this actually, however I figured I should knit a few pairs conventionally before attempting to develop my own method. Well now I don't have to wait, nor do I need to develop it myself because this Melissa lady did it for me. The book (so far) is well written, in a somewhat conversational tone rather than just step by step. Rather than just giving steps for the technique she first describes it and explains how it works. I've always like that in knitting books, or any instructional/technical book because after-wards instead of just knowing how to do something i know why it works in the first place and what advantage it has. Currently I've started the sample pair of socks it has in it, and though i only have a few rounds done the technique is easy and already advantageous. The first round is a total of 32 stitches, first 16 knit, second 16 k1, p1 ribbing. Well in my infinite haste I didn't pay attention to that and instead just assumed it was knit across both sets of 16. Since this was a test anyway even though it wasn't many stitches botched up nor would it have been difficult to fix, why fix it? Didn't seem to make sense to me, so i knit across all 32 stitches on the second sock as well, which is where the big advantage i see lies. I now don't need to remember i did that. For instance on the sock i was working conventionally I know i made some modifications while knitting the leg, but now (6ish months later) I can't for the life of me remember what they were, I don't even remember if i modified the pattern, the length, etc. No clue. So instead of having to make notes of every change made I'll just make the same change to the second sock while it's fresh in my memory. Brilliant.
Aside from that I had a hat about 75 percent of the way done for my cousin for Christmas. Until I (again) didn't pay attention to the pattern, messed it up and had to restart it. Other UFO's include another hat that I'm about 1/4 done with, a purse/bag knit out of VHS tape for my cousin, and a chess set I'm working on for my brother which was supposed to be a Christmas present but turned out to be a bit more involved than i thought so he obviously is getting it a bit late. He's ok with that and saw that pieces i have done so it's ok.
I finished a hat that i had made for myself, it was really quick and easy, sadly i have no photos of it. But the nice part was that someone complimented me on it on christmas at my grandma's house, asked to try it on. Well she loved it and it fit her (i'm not sure how because i have a big head) so since it was Christmas I told her she could have it if she'd like. I was on my way out anyway but later got quite a few texts from relatives that she won't stop talking about how much she liked it, and later i find out that that hat was the one and only gift she received that year. That last part made me overwhelmingly happy but also quite sad, as she has a couple of kids, who apparently didn't get/make her anything, not even a card.
Well though there are many other UFO's at my house, in fact enough to over fill the Home Depot shopping basket i have at my house (which I haven't the foggiest idea how it got there) that's all I'm going to get into for now.

maybe at some point I'll go through this post and proofread and add links but that isn't happening right now.