tackling a pattern

Alrighty... so i got some new yarn - again picked out by minime. I found a pattern for a dish cloth and decided to go with it. It's a little involved, but hey, it's all numbers right? Riiiight... Well, it started off alright - cast on, knit 4 rows. Easy peasy. There's a note that each row starts and ends w/ 3 knit stitches. Ok no problem. Then the madness begins: 

Row 1: k1 *p1 k9 p1 k1 (repeat from *) No problem. First, knit three, then knit one, purl one, knit nine, purl one, knit one, back to purl 1 etc... then knit 3, next row. No problem. Well until the row where I forgot to start w/the three knitted stitches. Ok... what now... I couldn't take them off cuz at that moment I couldn't quite do it in reverse. So I just knitted the rest of the row, cast(ed)-off and tried again. First 2 pics after the ball of yarn are that first attempt. Oh yeah, I also learned that it's possible for additional stitches to spontaneously appear on the needle... at some point I realized that I was ending up w/ more than 3 stitches remaining after I did the pattern but I could swear I did the correct initial number of stitches...

Tried again... more fun. Somehow the pattern went all awry again. This time I had stitches disappear as well as appear. Started w/ 31, at one point had only 30 and at another had 34. Spontaneous de/regeneration of stitches. Ultimately it should have a diamondesque pattern formed by the switches between knitting & purling. There are 7 rows each w/ a diff pattern then they're done in reverse and then the whole set is repeated. You can kiiinda see in the second set of pics that there's definitely some signs of a pattern there... I've decided to just keep going w/ this one instead of starting over. Hopefully at least for the rest of it, it might look like something - we'll see.

Learned a li'l of how to read a pattern. This one didn't involve too much:

k - knit

p - purl

kx (where x is a number) - knit x  stitches

px (where x is a number) - purl x stitches

RS - right side

CO - cast off

(kx, py)  z times (where x,  y, z are numbers) - repeat the sequence in the parentheses z times

* - in this pattern it designated the beginning of a repeated section of a row.

Hmmm... the tricky thing is going to be making sure that whenever I stop, I actually know what row I did last. Before I wasn't doing anything special so I could just put it down and pick it up and keep it moving. And at the moment since it's kinda botched I'm just going to knit a few rows and start again w/ the beginning of the pattern. But given that I won't likely have multiple hours at a stretch to dedicate I'll have to come up w/ something. maybe just make a note on the paper I wrote the pattern down on... we'll see.