Manatee and box

 I worked on the manatee a bit more this evening; I am up to the "just knit plain" part to make the body, but I took a moment to put in the lockwasher eyes:

It's always a bit of a gamble with these, you have to hope you get them positioned right since you put them in before stuffing. Also, I wound up going with 15 mm. I know real manatees have smallish eyes; the pattern as written called for 6 mm but that was for a dk weight yarn - I guessed 12 mm would work for the upsized one of a bulky but they looked just a bit small. 

The good thing about them is that the face is almost done by the time you finish the animal - I will just have to embroider on the nostrils and maybe a mouth when I get this done. (But it's a LOT more rows - I am at round 30 and there's something like 82, most of them at the full 60 stitches to make the body).

I also got my monthly Gachapon crate today. A couple of cute things in it

A tiny "cord holder" bird that will clip on to something like a phone charger cord, and Scorbunny (there is usually a Pokemon creature of some kind in these crates) with a floatie for "summer fun" (I do not think the floatie actually floats). And a small squishy shark. (There was also a little game, and a tiny replica of a Japanese vending machine that require assembly and I didn't feel like fussing with it tonight). I might take the shark over to my office as a fidget toy; as I said I find I need these things more now. Maybe I won't always need them but I think the combined "dealing with lots of griefs" and "dealing with the whole pandemic thing" means I find having small things to hold or play with helps a lot.

(I also never mentioned that I bought - cheaply enough, considering how much it would cost me to source and obtain the right kind of long-haired fake fur in the right color - a "fake marimo ball" from someone on Etsy - basically a small beanbag made of green fake fur. I kind of wanted a marimo at one point but not now after learning they can be infested with zebra mussel larva and I wonder what happens when you change the water the marimo are in, if the larvae wind up traveling to your water treatment plant, which could potentially be a problem depending on how the plant is configured and how old it is - and I know ours is kind of old. At any rate, the "fake marimo" is another nice little thing to hold in your hands or toss around while thinking)

And then this little bag, which is actually my favorite thing, even though I didn't immediately know what condiment it was supposed to be. (Google translate tells me Nori tsukudani, which I guess is a seaweed paste?) At any rate, it's the right size for a small knitting project like socks, and it's undeniably interesting to look at:

The Doki Doki crate (which is larger items, and usually has more "useful" things in it), is still on the way but hopefully it will come soon.