Midday Saturday stuff

* Well, my bad dream of last night will not come true because I came home at noon and browned the chuck roasts and stuck them in the slow cooker (this time with more water, and also a can of tomato sauce and some green onions - I will make the other sauce (with onions, chilis, and chopped tomatoes) tomorrow morning, but I'm hoping maybe the acid and more liquid will make this batch easier to "pull" - the last batch I wound up chopping much of it because it stayed tough. (I may have undercooked it slightly. Or I may have not had enough liquid in there)

* Added some more things to the manuscript; decided to add in species-frequency tables too which are a pain in the neck to make. I got the simpler one (the 2018 data) done, am trying to decide if I have the energy to go back and fight with the 2000 data this afternoon.

* Mail has arrived. One thing I needed came, and a couple things I wanted (and despite getting my "June and July" checks - which is really my having derped and messed up filling out my contract info a year or more ago, and it defaulted to the unchangeable "12 checks per year" from the 10 checks I used to do, I will have to be careful with money from here on out).

the thing I needed:

Another Policy and Law book, this one the most recent one I could find. It wasn't cheap. In the old days I'd be saving the receipt for tax-time, but now - well, the standard deduction is higher than the combined donations/deductible expenses I have (thank God, my medical bills thus far have been small and almost entirely covered by insurance), so it's easier to just take the standard than to try to game it up to being over the limit.

And the things I wanted. (These were from The Littlest Gift Boutique, a place in Canada)

Remember when "inbread cats" was an Internet joke? Well, this is kind of the dog version - Bread-Kun, a shiba inu that is also a loaf of bread:

So squishy. (There has been a great advance in stuffing technology in recent years, I think...at any rate, some of the toys I've seen lately seem a lot softer than the ones I remember from 20 or more years ago).

I have too many of these kind of things already (the corgi, and the one I call Rhombus that I thought was a shiba but is apparently a fox, and a shiba iny that came in the most recent Japan Crate....though I am considering perhaps regifting that to my niece at some point...) but I couldn't resist the face on this one.

And then: bootleg Pony alert!

Yeah, this is Soarin'. Made by some Chinese company and frankly I don't really know the legal status of these because they're not officially licensed by Hasbro (that I can see) and yet, Hasbro made very few stuffies of non-Mane-Six characters, and they don't seem to come after the small craftspeople who make stuffed versions, so....IDK. I admit the rule-follower/law-abider part of me feels a little idgy, like maybe I'm doing something not quite right, but....I don't know. I suppose the way of looking at it is that I've bought "official" plush of each of the Mane Six (in some cases, more than one version) and I doubt any of the R and D people or the executives at Hasbro are going to bed hungry at night but yeah...

I will say, as Gen 4 winds down, I do wish they had made more toys of the "background ponies" than they did - oh, there were the blind bags and all, but the bigger ones, or the official plush, were hard to come by. Like, I would have really liked an official stuffie of Sapphire Shores (and what fun could have been had with her; make some outrageous outfits for her to wear. Yes, there's the roughly "brushable" sized one, but the clothes for that are plastic and it's not as fun as "real" cloth dresses would be). And I'd have liked the Student Six in plush form. (I do have the Ocellus I crocheted, but oh, how I want a Smolder).

So perhaps it's a grey area, I don't know.

(It will be interesting to see how they approach Gen 5. What I'd like would be for them to periodically make specials/tv movies featuring the good ol' Mane Six and that world, with that art style, but maybe....I don't know, for Gen 5 maybe do more of a slice of life/comedy sort of thing, and maybe reuse some of the characters from Generation 3? Or maybe center Gen 5 on the Student Six, though it wouldn't really be My Little *Ponies* then. Or maybe go back to Gen 1 and use some of those tropes, I don't know. Or make them more like realistic horses....)