I was out looking for toys today, and I found this guy just in time for my Halloween decorations.
Oh my gosh, I can't explain to you how much I love this figure. I didn't really like the episode of the What If? show that it came from that much, but the figure fills me with so much joy. It'll be amazing on the shelf at Halloween. I can put him side-by-side with my werewolf Captain America too.
I have a thing for the Iron Man Hulkbuster armor. I don't know why. I just love it. Of all the toys I own, it's the thing that I have the most versions of. I once posted this picture of my Hulkbusters (plus a few regular Iron Mans and War Machines) on Instagram.
There's a few Hulkbusters that I've always wanted but still have yet to get. I'm almost done with the Wall of Voodoo now, though, and if I don't get them soon, I won't have a place for them on the shelves. So, it might be time to take care of that.
So, I got on eBay, and bought the Marvel Select Hulkbuster that I've wanted lo these many years.
I'm kinda bummed, because I didn't pay close enough attention to the one that I ordered. He's missing the shoulder pads. I guess that's why he was the cheapest. It looks fine though, so I won't complain. I'm happy enough to have him. Now the only one I need to get is the old Marvel Legends Legendary Riders version.
A while ago, Hasbro came out with a Baroness figure that came with a motorcycle.
It was a Target exclusive, and as is the case with all of the Target exclusive G.I. Joes, it was impossible to find. I never saw it once to even agonize over whether I wanted to spend the extra $20 to get a bike that I didn't want.
Not too long ago, though, that Snake Eyes movie came out. They put out a wave of figures to go with it, and the Baroness is one of them. The figure sucks, though. I look at it, and it doesn't make me think of the Baroness at all.
The Baroness always had that feeling of being a sexy dominatrix or something, but this figure makes me think of the librarian playing dress up at home with her cats.
The girl in the movie doesn't look this bad.
Although I think the short hair was a mistake. It just doesn't look like the character.
Sienna Miller fit the bill much better in The Rise of Cobra simply because of the hair.
Well, since that new figure sucks so bad, I figured I was going to continue to go without a Baroness on the shelf next to my Cobra Commander and Destro, but then I had an idea.
Years ago, before the G.I. Joe six inch figures existed, I was dreaming up ideas of how I could make my own kitbashed versions. I bought a Spiderwoman figure back in the day just to do that.
I guess I needed one of those Baroness movie figures after all. I could swap the heads out and all of a sudden she'd be perfect. So, I grabbed myself one, and here we are.
The skin tone doesn't quite match, but you can't see it up on the shelf. So, I'm happy.
I like it.
I'm sure they'll come out with a new version of her in the future. Maybe I'll replace her then, but for now, at least, I'm happy to see another figure in that line up.
Oh, since I was at it, I figured I'd fix another figure. I never much like the head for the new Scarlett either.
So, I removed her head, and switched it with a Black Widow head that I have.
I think I prefer it, but the Scarlett figure still needs a lot of work. Just too busy with the colors on that design. I'm afraid to waste time trying to repaint it only to find that Hasbro is about to release a brand new version that looks just like I wanted it to look. I'll probably just wait and see. This head is enough for now.
I put these dollar store figures together on a shelf. They look pretty good, right?
None of our noses started bleeding, which was a mercy, but we did get pretty winded ascending all of those stairs. I guess the air was pretty thin way up there, and we're not used to that kind of high altitude anymore.
We've been to Astros games before but the rest of the family never got very into baseball. I'm really the only one who is a big enough fan to name most of the players, and even I'm losing track as the team changes from year to year.
Baseball might still be a little much for my nine-year-old. He had a pretty hard time sitting still, especially as the game got longer. I started to wish I wasn't sitting next to him as he squirmed into all the oddest positions that anyone could possibly sit on a stadium seat.
We did get him and my daughter an ice cream cone each. A big splurge considering that each cone cost about two dollars more than the most expensive half-gallon would have cost us at the store.
We were all really thirsty as well, and, of course, the drinking fountains were turned off due to covid. Wouldn't you know it, it cost more than $7 for a bottle of water. It must have been special water brought down from Mt. Everest on Yak back, because there's no way someone would charge that much money for the same bottle of water you could buy at the grocery store for $2. That couldn't be possible. Especially not when they'd turned off the drinking fountains.
Anyhow, the game was pretty good. The Astros took an early lead on a two-run homer by Yordan Alvarez, but the Diamondbacks took the lead on a three-run inning in the fourth. The Astros tied it back up in the sixth inning with a sacrifice fly.
We stayed locked up through the ninth inning. My wife was not pleased. She likes baseball okay, but feels that the games just take too long, and that's for a normal-length game. Now we were going into extra innings.
It didn't take much longer, however, because in the tenth, the Diamondbacks doubled their run total, and the Astros couldn't manage to reply, so we lost 6-4. Here's highlights of the game if you'd like to check them out:
Long game and downer ending notwithstanding, we still had a good time.
They handed out kits, and we put our rocket together. We assumed that you were supposed to decorate your creation. My son decided that he wanted to make his rocket look like something created by Tony Stark from the Iron Man movie. Here's what we came up with.
We arrived at the meeting, and discovered that we were the only ones who decorated their rocket in any way. I guess we should have asked questions of the den leader. We could have saved a lot of time and a little money as well. That's okay, our rocket was the coolest, so we could be happy about that.
When we went to put it on the launchpad, however, we ran into trouble. There was some paint that had caked around the holes in the clip that holds the rocket in place. Luckily, we were able to scrape it off enough that our rocket wouldn't get stuck trying to liftoff.
It lifted off just fine, and functioned just like it was supposed to.
It was a lot of fun, and sure to be memorable for the little guy.
As I'm working on finishing up the Wall of Voodoo, I also have to finish up certain things needed to display the toys I'm going to put in the dividers on my shelves. Like my DeLorean from Back to the Future.
I don't want it to just sit there like a car on the shelf. It's got wheels that turn down to put it in flight position. It would be such a shame not to display the car flying.
That means that I'll have to make myself a flight stand for a car though. I think I can do it, but I've never tried it before.
I'm going to use the same method that I did for the flight stands that I made a video about on my Toy channel.
I needed to make it much bigger though.
Turns out that was really the only big difference, and it wasn't much more difficult than the one post stand.
The hardest part was just messing with the length of the posts to give it that ideal tilt without overdoing it and cutting a post off too short. It looks like it'll work, but this picture doesn't give you a real feel for it. Let's get it painted and then you'll see.
There we go. and since it's a black stand on a black shelf, it's nearly invisible. It looks like the car really is flying. Though, there's a spot on one of the posts that I missed. Gotta fix that.
Had this song stuck in my head for a while, and for some reason I had the urge to post it to the blog, so here you go.
On Monday morning, I got a text from him that said that I ought to prepare to possibly spend the night at work that night. I grumbled, but starting gathering the supplies that I had last used during the February freeze.
I piled it up in the living room as I grabbed it all, and Jupiter came out to investigate.
I took it all out to the car, and stuffed it in, then I headed to work a little early, just in case. It was mild weather at first, but then I got blasted by a heavy downpour for about twenty minutes, long enough for me to think Nicholas had come a little early. He wasn't supposed to hit until sometime between late this evening through tomorrow afternoon. It was just temporary though, and I finished out my drive on dry roads.
At work, I unloaded my car and stashed my stuff in the wellness room before anyone else could claim it. The wellness room is where breastfeeding mothers can go to pump while they're at work. It's one of very few rooms that has a lock on the door, so it's pretty nice if you can get it. I stayed in that room in February too.
I staked my claim, and headed down to begin covering the Tropical Storm.
The whole afternoon was pretty quiet. Not a lot was going on yet. We even recorded this beautiful sunset on our towercam as we waited for the storm to arrive.
Most of us were pretty surprised to see the sun poke its way through the clouds, but we sure didn't complain about it.
I called my wife to make sure she was coming home before the storm got bad and made driving treacherous, and she told me she was already home. They had shut down her work early to ensure everyone's safety, so she was home having a lovely evening with the kids. not only that, but they'd shut down school as well as her work for the next day, so they would be home for a while.
As the night wore on, it was starting to look like Tropical Storm Nicholas was going to be a dud. The eye was drifting a little out to sea, and the weatherman was lowering the forecasted rain levels. It appeared as though we were getting a reprieve, and Nicholas would skip around us.
If you know about hurricanes, however, you should know that this development could also be a bad thing. Over land, storms weaken, but over water, especially warm gulf water, storms strengthen. That's what happened here.
We went into our ten o'clock news show thinking that it would be a normal half-hour long production. But just before we went to air, Nicholas crossed the threshold in ferocity from tropical storm to hurricane.
Our news coverage immediately expanded. We had reporters strategically placed around the area, including a couple of our favorite places to visit, Surfside Beach and Galveston Island. Surfside is further west, so it got hit first. The rain was blowing in sideways. Our reporter out there was getting tossed around like a rag doll. Then the monsoon shorted his mic out, and he had to give up and hide in the truck, reporting from inside the cab with a backup mic.
Hurricane Nicholas then moved up the coast to Galveston, where it made life dangerous for our other seaside reporter.
They extended the newscast to 11:00 PM, then took it online and we continued with a webcast for an hour and a half. Then, when all the late programming ended, we went back on air and broadcast live. I was stuck in the seat in the feedroom until the morning show editors arrived at 1:00 AM, and when they finally arrived, we were still going strong. We stayed on air until 2:00 AM, gave everybody a little break, then went back on at 4:00 AM, and stayed on until 1:00 PM, I believe.
Luckily for me, however, my shift came to an end at 1:00 AM, and I could turn things over to someone else for the rest of the coverage. I went up to my digs in the wellness room, spread out my blanket, and started snoring away. As I was drifting off, I think I could hear rain on the roof overhead, but I couldn't be sure. It just as easily could have been the air conditioner running.
Meanwhile, my wife had little to worry about. She didn't sleep well, but it was more because of worry for what was going on with her work than it was from worry about the storm. The power did go out for about a half-hour at 5:00 AM, but that's the worst our part of Houston fared. The hardest thing about the storm for her was dealing with all the logistics created by shutting things down for the storm. She was home all day, but was also working all day.
Once again, I think we were really lucky when picking our home. There's been a lot of natural disasters since we arrived, and somehow we've skated through all of them unscathed. I can't help but be very thankful for that.
Other places in Houston didn't do as well. When I woke up in the morning, we had pictures like these to share with our viewers.
Am I the only one who looks at that picture on the packaging and thinks that Hasbro wants you to molest Captain Marvel?
What kind of lights and sound activate when you touch her there?
I think Jupiter got jealous because I was spending all my time making the shelves for my toys or something.
Very realistic that cat statue, don’t you think?
We've been thinking about getting a kitten for my youngest son that could be his special pet. We've had a cat for a while named Juno.
We got her back in 2008, so she's getting pretty old. Which makes her pretty uninterested in playing the kinds of things a nine-year-old wants to play. On top of that, she's old enough to remember when he was born, and the crazy things he tried to do to her when he was still a toddler.
And let me tell you, Juno knows how to hold a grudge.
So, we got a new cat for the boy today. It is super cute, and a lot of fun to play with. Here is the new cat, Jupiter, sitting in my son's lap.
Looks like this might work out...although Juno really seems to dislike the new arrival.
