Well, I just finished the second paper-rewrite, incorporating all the teeny tiny suggestions that were made. And, damn, I think it's pretty good now. (But with my record, that does not bode well for acceptance. Usually when I think something is good, it gets rejected, and when I think it's been over-engineered to the point where all the life is sucked out of it, in it goes.)

Still, it's a huge relief to have it done. There was a lot of additional data analysis to do - which is always kind of scary, those analyses I didn't think to do that the reviewers recommend, because there's always a chance of an ugly fact puncturing the lovely theory I've set up. Well, in this case, the new "facts" (such as they are) support my interpretation of the earlier results. So that's a cheering thing.

And now, I'm fighting a further temptation - still thinking of packing here - to either copy the kangaroo pattern from "World of Knitted Toys" or to take my Knit a Square, Make a Toy book (or a copy of the pattern from it) with me and do the kangaroo. I don't know. I go on periodic spurts of "liking" a particular animal and wanting to make or collect little avatars of it - have been that way since childhood. Right now, it's kangaroos. Earlier, it was penguins, and much earlier, it was giraffes. And elephants. And sheep, although the sheep are a more recent thing, with the advent of my knitting habits.

It was easier when I was a kid and I could save up my allowance for the little Dakin stuffed animals a couple of the gift shops in town used to sell (children of the 70s/80s, remember Dakin?). Or to go to the dime store and buy a plastic bag full of "zoo animal figures" or "farm animals" - these were little (maybe about 1-2") plastic figures of animals. They used to make a lot of different sets - I remember having one of different dog breeds. Seems to me that Kresge's and places like that used to sell them. They were all roughly on the same scale, although sometimes there were some oddities - like the elephants were really not bigger than the horses or lions, or the small animals were bigger than they were really supposed to be. They were among my favorite toys - they were fun to play with in the sandpile, or in the mud. They could then be washed off and some played with in the bath, or on rainy days, build "habitats" for them on the living room floor out of blocks or Lego bricks. The carpet was grass for the grazing animals, even if it was the wrong color...the sofas were mesas, and you could lay a silk scarf or a piece of cloth along the floor to be a river, even better if it was a watery blue silk scarf. I think some of the animals still exist, in a box at my parents' house, but a lot of them got scuffed up and their paint worn off from being in the sand, and some got limbs accidentally amputated, and some just got lost or sucked up in the vacuum cleaner...such is life.

Now, of course, as a Responsible Adult, I suppose I should be into buying the Baccarat (or whatever is the name of that crystal company) figures of the animals I'm interested in, or purchasing Environmentally-Responsible Free Trade Art sculptures of the animals made by craftspeople indigineous to the area where the animals live, rather than talking about making knitted toys for myself. But I have to admit, there are days I'd still like to have my little plastic set of Dog Breeds of the World back, and a nice big sandpile to play in...