Tonight I'm knitting

I am making that promise to myself. This week is almost over, the one big thing I need to have done for the start of next week is done, the big thing I need to have done for the end of nex t week can probably be finished this afternoon. I want to work on the "pronk" socks or maybe work a little on the sleeve of Raven.

I am both emotionally and intellectually tired. Emotionally because it's been Too Many People All The Time this week and even though *most* of the interactions have been positive (a church board meeting is always good when there's laughter during it, and also some of the rare "neutral" physical contact I ever get (being patted on a shoulder by someone) came at that meting), still, being around people so much wears me out.

And I'm still intellectually tired from all the extra math I've been doing for things. And having too-long a list of what to do.

My brain has been, to put it euphemistically, "Crud Posting" in my dreams (link to the unfiltered term and what it means from reddit, for those who are really interested). I have too much random stuff floating around in my brain and it comes out in my dreams as random stuff. ("My brain is sorting its recycling" but a lot of this stuff needs to go straight to the trash, and if my understanding of how memory works is right, this is junk I really don't need to remember).  So I feel tired when I wake up after dreaming about things like going to a fancy restaurant with my family and seeing a seafood sampler for $107 on the menu and thinking I wanted it but that my parents would think it was a ridiculous price for a meal and then I found out there were things like sea cucumbers that I would never eat on there. And being at the doctors and having to weigh myself and call out the weight to her in front of other people and having to be truthful about it....and all of this is stuff I can trace to stuff I observed in passing or talked about (the weighing was talking with someone else about the silly fitness program on campus).

So I think I need a quiet evening with relatively little mental stimulation, especially of the interacting-with-people kind. (I suspect PART of this is allergies, my allergies also affect my cognition and mood).

I also want to start finishing some things. I have too many things on the needles and need to get *something* done.

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The Doki Doki box for September came. I can see how rising costs have forced them to do smaller amounts of stuff (but it is larger things). I will admit I preferred the smaller sillier things, but one of the Lessons of Adulthood I get handed again and again is that I don't get what I want in this life.

Anyway. I can't complain TOO much.

This box was cat-themed. Best item was the t-shirt, I think - a pretty powder blue shirt with sort-of an artistic design of three white cats (sort of abstract cats) tumbling down one side. There's a bit of writing on it, this time they provided a translation (I won't wear a shirt with writing in a language I cannot read on it without a trustworthy translation). It is something like "Cat's first steps," which is fine. It's a dressy-enough shirt I probably could wear it with a casual skirt. (It also looks bigger and looser than the Rilakkuma one last month. Don't know if different supplier or someone complained, but if this is the "new standard" size I may choose to drop back to a Medium - I like my t-shirts more fitted now. Unless this shrinks upon washing.)

There was also a "plushie" in there - a super cute white cat named "Julie." Julie has kind of a late-50s/early-60s vibe to her, because she is wearing a pillbox hat and has, uh, "cat eye" make up. (She is a character invented by Doki Doki to be in the style of kawaii Japanese cartoons....they do that a lot, I presume the licensing is more reasonable).

There were also two Pusheen items - a laptop sticker which I MIGHT deploy on my laptop, and a really cute knit hat with Pusheen's eyes and whiskers embroidered on the turn-up. It's almost like those animal hats popular a year or so ago but less obvious, and therefore something I am less likely to go "nope, too old for that" about. (It would make an excellent cold-day-fieldwork hat as it's close fitting).

There was also the inevitable Hoppe-Chan figure. I am getting tired of her but apparently others love her, so....this is Hoppe Chan wearing cat ears and a tail.

And there was a cute little cuboidal cat coin purse with a zipper. Well, they say "coin purse" but to me it looks like a holder for knitting-stitch markers, row counter, and rolled-up measuring tape. (Scissors will not quite fit, though maybe a tiny pair of snips would).