some comfort surfing

 A slightly jangling day - someone was apprehended in my classroom building. I don't know all the details but apparently they are a "known quantity" to campus police, someone who impersonates a student (but is not, and acts squirrelly when someone approaches them and asks) and apparently this time they had a reason to remove the person from the building and they wound up making a bit of a scene.

I was in class at the time, I heard some of the noise (one of our grad students reports "they were screaming bloody murder at first") but by they time they were walked past my classroom they were merely yelling and I thought it was just someone being loud - sometimes we get students who are talking loudly and joking and forget classes are in session and I really only step out in the hall and give the stink-eye if people are taking an exam.

But anyway. One of the things I do as a comfort behavior (though I have to be careful as I sometimes get tempted to buy things) is to surf information about different animal species (or to look at sites offering stuffed toy animals, which is where I get tempted).

I like museum gift shops too, and some are online now. One of my favorite places, and I admit I've ordered from them in the past, is "Paleozoic Pals" otherwise known as the Paleontological Research Institute (apparently they are in upstate New York). I've looked at their home page a bit, but the attraction for me are, like I said, the Paleozoic Pals

I own a Tiktaalik and a Gorgonops and I admit today I was looking at the Ammonite and wondering if I needed one. (No, not really: and one of the headaches of August is it's a long month and my last paycheck of any size was in May - I got paid for summer teaching but not much and a big chunk of that went to car repairs)

But I do like the idea of semi-realistic* prehistoric creature plush

(*well, as 'realistic' as the current reconstructions are, and I confess I'm hoping for some evidence someday that will make the reconstructors stop making the "shrinkwrapped" models of dinosaurs and such and make them chubbier. I once saw a drawing of "what if t-rex was really like a sparrow" and it was pretty funny. And I also want to believe more dinos had feathers, and that they had bright plumages like modern birds, because I think that would be cool.)

Gage Beasley also has some things, though I ordered a lion cub plush from them once and was disappointed in the quality a little. But they do have a page of articles about "the cutest dinosaurs" and some of them are pretty comic. Nothronychus is my favorite, look at that emu-ish goofball!

I admit though I kind of want a plush plesiosaurus. Supposedly at one time they thought Nessie - if she existed* - that she was a plesiosaurus and I admit that that is somehow pleasing to me to imagine a small population of relict dinosaurish ocean creatures, even if the reasonable part of my brain says that's impossible (then again, they found coelocanths).

(*Sadly, I doubt she does. And there was recent talk of a "big new expedition" and I almost feel like "let us have this, don't go looking hard, some of us want to pretend she's out there like we want to pretend there are fairies" and I feel like going looking hard for Nessie will turn out that the famous photo really was just a branch, or perhaps - ahem - a whale's male member, as some people have proposed [you are welcome to google photos of those on your own if you want to])

I have also used Stuffed Safari which is also good for mailing gifts to people because their shipping is good and fast and they package things well. They have a wide diversity of animals, mostly commonly known brands like Aurora or Wild Republic.

Etsy is another fun place to look EXCEPT there's an awful lot of drop shippers on there now where it's not actually handmade stuff, it's all the same made-in-China-and-shipped-here identical plush, and I assume the quality is not great given the price. There are individual makers but again, a lot of their stuff, as wonderful as it is (a lot of the MLP plush is unbelievably nice looking), it's out of my budget at the moment. 

(What I need to do is motivate myself again to make stuff myself. I CAN sew and did formerly make a lot of plush toys myself, it's just, it's harder where I live to find the right kinds of materials for them, and also, right now, my sewing room is HOT given that it's got a flat roof and is not insulated in any way, so being in there is less pleasant). 

And yeah, as an adult I own even more stuffed toys than i did as a kid. A few of the ones are in fact left from my childhood - my Pink Panther, and Basil the Basset Hound and a few others. But also - there are so many MORE now you can buy, and better quality! There wasn't nearly as much a selection when I was a kid, and also, of course, I had almost no spending money.