Yarn Winding Nightmare

First, let me say that my birthday on Wednesday was okay - definitely not as bad as last year, alone in NH, but the fact that my family is currently a confusing mess of people ostracizing other people complicated things.  I almost wish I had gone out of town to avoid the guilt storm that followed yesterday.  "You went out with THEM? Instead of ME?"  You get the idea.

On another note, I'm going to Maine! I'm really pumped, and I figured that my current WIPs (besides CC, who is still waiting for her pattern to appear again) are pretty concentration-intensive, so I've decided to work on a pair of socks for myself (again)!

The pattern is going to be Dragonfly Socks, which I found through a KAL that Dee is hosting on her blog.  The yarn is going to be this:

Eskimimi Knits Brocoli Sockoli.  I LOVE the color of this yarn, and it was really the first indie yarn I ever bought because of the color.

But, winding it... what a nightmare! I don't have a swift anymore - I was only borrowing the one at school from Ash - so I tried various techniques to wind the hank.  Eventually all I got was this:

Which took me two hours to detangle.

And then, of course, the skein was funny looking so I had to rewind it again, when this happened.

By that time it was late at night, and I could only react by sobbing and going to bed.

This morning I re-wound the mess twice and finally settled for this.  I don't like that there's such a large difference in height between the outside of the skein and the inside, but look - here's the culprit.

 

The skein is 100g of sock yarn - twice the normal amount.  If I had just wound the hank into two balls, everything would have been fine.  This is pretty much how my 22nd year of life has been so far.