Russell and Dug

While I was out doing my usual sweep of all the Walmarts, Targets, Rosses, Five Belows, and sometimes Walgreenses, I came across this figure hanging on the pegs.

I complained to myself about how dumb it was that they had only Dug available to buy from the Up movie in this toy line. Especially since they try to sell the line on the figures being interactive one with another. Look at that stupid picture up in the corner where they show Dug talking with Mr. Incredible. Lame.

I've complained to myself (yes, I'm always by myself) about this many times, because the figure has been out for a while.

But then I went to another Walmart, and came across this figure on the pegs.

Russell! Oh my gosh, this thing is so great. I had to have it. Especially since I'd just seen Dug at the other store. 

Stupidly, they've got Russell talking to Zurg in the picture in the corner on this one. Why didn't they have him talking with Dug? I guess they're not in the same wave, so they can't be promoting an older figure.

Anyway, I bought Russell, and then changed directions on my usual sweep to head back to the Walmart that still had Dug, and now I've got the both of them.

They look so great together up on the shelf.

I suspect that they will do a Carl Fredrickson in the next wave, and that will be nice, but I don't even think it's necessary. I'd be happy with just these two if that's all they ever gave us.

The Holy Grail

Among toy collectors, when there’s a toy you’ve always wanted, they call it your grail. You're on a quest to find it, like Arthur and his round table. 

 

I recently acquired one of my grails.

 

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted the Rancor. 40 years later, I’ve finally got it. Rish saw it at a toy show, I sent him some money, he bought it and shipped it out to me, and…behold the Rancor!

 

 

What other grails do I have? Not many anymore. I’d like to get a Dragonflyer from the Sectaurs with the wings still attached (or just the wings to put on the one that I do have).

 

And a Wheeled Warriors Drill Sargeant.

 

 

My guess is you’ve never heard of either of those things.

Staking Her Claim

I guess I’ll be doing something other than using my computer right now, she doesn’t appear to want to move.

Let's Go Racin'

My son does Cub Scouts with his friends at school, and it's pinewood derby time again. If you're unfamiliar, a pinewood derby is when they give you a block of wood and some wheels, and you turn it into a car. Then they race them down a hill to see who's the fastest.

I'm pretty terrible at creating fast cars. There's a lot of skill and science involved, and I just don't know anything about it. I just try to make the car look as nice as possible, but I'm not even very good at that. Woodworking really isn't my thing.

Aside from that, you're supposed to let the kid do as much as possible, which is another difficult thing to navigate.

Last year (whoops, not last year. No pinewood derby in the pandemic. Two years ago), we did a Batmobile:

When I asked him what he wanted to do this year, he said he wanted a DeLorean.

The scouts had a meeting at the cubmaster's house where the necessary tools were made available. I did my best to cut out the car the way my son wanted it, but I managed to make it a little wonky.

My wife got me a Dremel tool for art projects that I was working on a few years back, but I haven't quite learned how to best use it, so when I got it out and tried to hollow out a section of the car I managed to make that a little wonky too.

I kept working on it, gluing on some pieces to make it match my son's vision. I did try to find ways that he could help. At a certain point, I started to think that it might have been just fine if the nine-year-old had done everything. It certainly couldn't have been more wonky, at least. Maybe that's what I should do next year.

After screwing up about everything someone could possible screw up, I decided to do like they do on those cooking shows when the time is up. I just raised my hands and backed away from it. That way I couldn't mess it up any further, at least.

Here is our final product.

I think he was happy with it, even if everything looks crooked and wonky to me. So, I suppose I succeeded in the end.

They raced the cars this evening, and, as you might suspect from my description of the car's creation, his car didn't win any prizes.

It consistently came in third place, and I think that is mostly due to the fact that a new kid joined the den just this week, so all he had was a block of wood on wheels for his car. At least we were able to defeat the block of wood.

He did still have fun with the kids in his den, so it was a success in the end.

I believe we still have one more pinewood derby left, though. So, maybe next time we can actually make a fast car that wins races. The parents of the other scouts in the den, however, are made up of scientists and engineers, so if I want that to happen, I may need to get started now.

My Funny Valentine

 I made my first toy-related Valentine's Day decoration today. I probably shouldn't have, but there it is:

I love how very Care Bear like this character is, yet something is definitely off. Something's wrong with this Care Bear. She loves you, but do you want her to?

There's several other versions of this character. McFarlane made a seven inch version a while back, and I could get it on eBay without spending too much.

Also, Hasbro is doing another version that is known as Ragsy. That'll be in the six inch scale, and should come out in April or so. I think a six inch figure and a seven inch one could reasonable stand together. One of them would just be the tall girl.

I think it would be fun to get them both, and then combine them with some other figures that could pass as Valentine's related. They could be the Valentine's Avengers.

Anything you can think of that might be considered a Valentine's related action figure to join the Avengers with them?

Early Easter Present

 Check out this Fortnite figure.

Truthfully, it's very weird, kind of dumb looking, but I love it. I need more stuff for Easter, and it's coming up soon. And these little four inch guys are pretty cheap...especially at Ross.

I grabbed the guy, brought him home, and turned his goofy crowbar accessory into a sign wishing everyone a happy Easter.

Turns out I wasn't done, though, because when I went back to Ross, I found this other Fortnite figure that, while it wasn't explicitly Easter-related, it seemed to have matching colors to this guy. So I picked it up, and made it a sign as well.

In a couple of months, I'll put both of these two up on my shelves as decorations for the spring season.

The Sickness Is Overtaking Me

Ever since I got that Midas Rex Fortnite guy the other day, I've become a little obsessed with skull-faced guys. I've looking all over for more of them.

There's a new independent toy line that just went through crowd-funding that has a guy called The Bone Collector. I've seen a few guys on YouTube reviewing the figure, and now, I feel like I've got to have it.

I don't think I'll get to add him to my collection, though, because he's sold out. I didn't get in on the Kickstarter, and now even the ones that were made available for the general public are gone. Looks like this guy will never be on my Skull Face Squad.

I did make an addition to the ranks though. I discovered this Fortnite guy that I'd never seen before online, and bought one off eBay.

I like the look of him. He gives me a real Ghostrider feel. It's Ghostrider during his blue period.

The two new Skullies look good together.

I should have stopped there, but I didn't. Instead, I saw a Witcher figure at Target, and it was marked at 40% off. So, I jumped on it, and now there's three new members.

This is really getting out of hand and quick. All because of that Toy Galaxy video that fired up my excitement. I should avoid that guy's videos...and probably any one else's as well.

Skull Team Six

I haven't watched Toy Galaxy much in a while, because he changed his channel away from reviewing toys to doing the history of 80s TV shows instead. That doesn't turn me off per se, but he's already done all of the shows that I really liked in the 80s, and now he's doing shows that I've never heard of.

However, one thing he still does from the good old days is making his top ten toys of the year videos. He puts out all the toys that he's bought during the year, and winnows them down to his top ten favorites of all.

He does this each quarter, then at the end of the year he makes the final decision. I watched the final video of the year the other day, and saw a toy in his list that I'd never seen before, but I really liked.

Here he is talking about the figure:

It was a really cool guy, with a helmet that looks like a skull. It would be perfect to put right alongside these guys at Halloween.

I got those guys years ago, and thought they went great together, but now I wanted to add another member to the Skull Faces...to the Skullies...I don't know. I haven't got a good name for them yet. Feel free to suggest some.

I went to Target, where I had seen those new Fortnite guys, and I found that Midas Rex was still available, so I grabbed me one.

He comes with a regular head which makes me think of Rami Malik when he was the villain on the bond movie.

It's like it's the same head, but differently disfigured, a scar over the eye instead of a burned face.

I've had fun putting him into cool poses. He's a really interesting looking guy. Even my daughter thought he was neat. She saw him sitting on my desk, took that picture you see above, and sent it to me with this text:

Might be trouble, though. Now I'm looking at all the other figures out there that have skull faces, and I want them to add to my Skully team.

Yub Nub!

Now that we finished the Millenium Falcon, it was time for me and my son to put together his other big Christmas present.

Yup, that's the instruction for the Lego ewok village. Or, I guess I should say, the non-Lego ewok village. 

It's a bootleg, and that fact gave us a lot of trouble. It doesn't come packed the same way as the original. Instead, they put the pieces into dozens of little bags grouped by similar piece. It took forever just to open all the bags.

We put all the pieces into a giant Tupperware-type container so that we didn't lose any. Unfortunately, it's going to take us a lot of time searching through the container to find each piece we need. It's going to be a big challenge. Especially considering that there are 1,990 pieces in the set. Look at that container! That's huge, and it's totally full!

My son and I got to work, and by the end of day one, we had one tree and hut finished.

Emboldened by our success from the day before, we worked on the set from basically dawn till dusk the next day and put all 1,990 pieces together for this amazing piece of toy goodness:

I again want to confiscate it and put it on my own shelves. My son might even be down with that, because he's out of shelf space for all the Lego creations he's made over the years...but then again, I'm out of space too. Especially for something as massive as this thing is.

My son's birthday is coming up in just a few weeks, so I'm sure I'll have more pictures of Lego sets that I can share with you.

What If?

For Christmas, my kids got me the Captain Carter Marvel Legends figure.

And the corresponding Hydra Stomper Marvel Legends figure to go with it.

 I really wanted to put the two of them in that iconic pose that came from the episode where Captain Carter grabs a hand hold on the back of the Hydra Stomper armor and rides there as the suit flies to their next battle.

I needed a stand for the Hydra Stomper to fly on, though. I figured I could make one similar to the ones that I made in one of my old toy videos.

Those stands weren't enough. It was going to take way more posts to hold this big boy up. I got a much bigger base and put three posts in there, and it looks like it's going to work just fine.

I'm going to need to find a big enough space to put it on the shelf, however. The two of them together are bigger than I thought.

Covid Patients

The day after I got back from Green Bay was Wednesday. I was at work when my friend that I'd gone on the trip with sent me this text:

I couldn't believe it, but he was serious. He is a teacher, and had to take a Covid test before returning to work, and it came up positive. Maybe it was just in my head, but as soon as I read that text, I started to feel sick.

I'd just finished spending a weekend with the guy, sleeping in the same hotel room, driving in the same car, eating across from each other at the same table. If he had Covid, most likely I did as well.

That night, I found a 24-hour urgent care, and got a test of my own. It came up negative, however, so maybe it was all in my head, though it seemed to have gotten worse the whole day through. I had sinus pressure enough to feel like my head might burst, and my nose was getting pretty stuffy too.

My wife was taking no chances, however. She said that she just couldn't afford to get sick right now, so she insisted that I quarantine myself in my daughter's old room. She's gone off to college, so it was open. I stayed the night up there...and the rest of the week as well.

By the next morning, Thursday, I was most definitely sick. Now everything was wrong with me. I slept most of the morning through, hoping to be able to go to work when I felt better, but I didn't get better. I called my boss, and he told me to set up the work-from-home computer they'd given me months ago for just this eventuality.

It took a lot of effort to get through all of the proclivities of working from home, but eventually I was set up and ready to contribute to the editing of the afternoon news shows. I did my best to contribute, but I felt like absolute garbage the whole time. I was really sick, but they were counting on me to get the show on the air, so I struggled my way through the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, and fever (especially fever) and got my job done.

On Friday, I called in sick. I needed to get some rest if I was going to get better. Covid-19 is supposed to be pretty intense. I've heard that this new omicron is less nasty than the previous variants, but I didn't want to mess around with it. I spent half of the day asleep, and was able to sleep again at my regular bedtime.

I had tested negative before, but my wife told me that the rapid tests aren't as reliable as the PCR tests. She said that I needed to test again to make sure that my results were correct.

The city had opened up a brand new drive-through mega testing center up the way at the community center, so on Saturday morning I went over to test again as soon as it opened. I should have gone a little earlier, because the line was pretty long by the time I got there.

It's hard to see, but that's a line of cars going all the way out of sight. They were pretty efficient, though. It didn't take all that long before I made it to the front of the line.

When I got under that tent roof in the picture, they shoved a cotton swab up my nose and collected a sample. They told me I would get my results in two to three days.

I went back home, and slept for the majority of the day again locked away in my daughter's room. Every now and then, someone would open the door and look in on me to see how I was doing, but they kept away from me for the most part.

There was a big storm coming through Houston on Saturday, however, and I woke up to my phone blaring a tornado warning for my little suburb at about 4:00 in the afternoon. My wife didn't want to let me out, but the second floor is the worst place to be if a tornado strikes, so she told me I'd better come out and come downstairs.

I spent a couple of hours in the living room waiting out the tornado warning and then went back up to my cell in the spare bedroom. Then at 1:00 in the morning, my phone blared out another tornado warning for our suburb, so I went back down and slept on the couch for a few hours before going back up again.

We didn't get hit by any tornadoes, but the whole town was not as lucky as our house was.

That's a house with a gigantic tree on top of it. The storms did that to one of my neighbors not far from our house. We'd lucked out again.

The next morning, Sunday, I was feeling a lot better. I still had some issues, but my body was definitely over the hump. I don't think I got hit with a fever again.

My wife, on the other hand, was coughing and hacking. It looked like my banishment to the spare bedroom was all for naught. She seemed likely to have Covid as well. Even my seventeen-year-old daughter was showing some symptoms. The nine-year-old, however, was not. He probably had it, but was handling it as easily as we've been told kids tend to handle it.

On Monday morning, my wife and daughter went to get tested at the same place I had gone to. We all stayed home from school or work, but my wife and I did our work from home. We waited for our results to come in, and when they finally did, my wife discovered that she had gotten sick as well.

She was positive. I was positive. Strangely, my daughter was not. She came up negative. Probably a false negative, but it didn't matter. She stayed home the whole week anyway, as did we all.

Luckily, none of us got all that sick. I probably had it the worst, and it was only about as bad as a tough flu would have been in ages past. So, we are all doing well, and are about to be able to get back to life again. It will be a pleasure to do so as well. You never appreciate your day to day life until it is taken away from you.

Legonium Falcon

One of the presents my son got for Christmas this year was a big Lego Millennium Falcon. He worked on it for several days. I'd come home from work, and find it one step further along in the construction process. It looked like it was going to be pretty cool.

Then he stalled. Something was wrong, and the thing wasn't going together like it was supposed to. He lost interest and left it, so I finally had to step in and help him figure out what had happened. Somewhere, somehow he'd done a step wrong.

Last night, I struggled my way through the instruction manual, breaking the ship apart and then rebuilding it, but at least it wasn't from the ground up. Most of the hard work was done by my son, I just had to find the spot where things went awry.

It took several hours, and I was up very late, but at last I found it, and fixed it. We finished the rest of it off today, and behold the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.