Too many loops on my pineapple

The Blue Curacao shawl has been unravelled and restarted. I could not understand why I kept going wrong and had to keep unpicking almost as many rows as I crocheted. All was well for the first few rows then it all went pear shaped. After my 4th or 5th unravel I decided to bite the bullet and restart with a new ball. I sat quietly with the pattern and counted and counted every stitch and every row and realised that in my original shawl I had one loop too many on each pineapple! I must have kept misreading the pattern over and over in the same way but by starting again I read it differently ie. the right way. I am hoping now that the pattern will make sense and that my pattern sequences will all match up this time.

I had said today to Vicky J when she called that I couldn't understand why I was finding it so difficult when loads of Ravellers had no trouble with the pattern. In my own defence I do struggle with Doris Chan's way of writing patterns out. She is not the easiest of people to follow. Too many * to " and ** to ** repeats on every row it is so easy to miss the odd * or repeat the wrong bit.

Vicky J brought me the crochet hook roll that she has made for me. It will be so useful. I had intended some time back to make one for myself but if you remember the disaster when my sewing machine blew up. I have not got around to getting it repaired as I won't be able to lift it onto the table for quite some time.

The tree in the photo is the holly bush that grew and grew. You can get some idea of it's size by looking at the garage roof which is to the right of the tree. Now perhaps you will see why it is creating such a nuisance to my Sky satellite signal.

The other photo shows my little regular morning visitor. He is quite bold and comes up to the window whilst I am in the chair you can see if you look carefully in the plant pot. Mr or Mrs Squirrel is under the spiky plant looking to see if there were any nuts buried in there. He/she is quite unfazed by my presence and comes right up to the window and looks at me.