The Cave: Revealed!!!

For sooo long I've been waiting to have a nice space to sit in and admire my bizarre assortment of things. And my wife has been waiting for the same amount of time, because it means my action figures won't be staining the atmosphere of the rest of our home. I've been waiting, and waiting... and now it's finally here!!! The day when I finally draw back the veil and reveal to you the Great Goodwill Geek Cave of Awesomeness!!! Okay, so really it's just the room where I keep all my crap out of everyone else's way... but it's all mine, and it's where I keep the things that I look at to make me feel sane in this world of stress and work and mortgage payments, etc. etc. It was one of my goals in moving to not only have separate rooms for the kids, and a big bedroom for my wife and I... but for my wife and I to also have our own separate spaces to do our own things. So she got a craft room and I got... this:

Here are two wide shots of the room, from one end to the other. Be careful... look too long and blindness due to the sheer, unadulterated awesome radiating from these images may occur. This top shot shows off the 'library' portion of the room (or at least most of it...) and about 85% of my current toy collection. 

This bottom shows off the "office" portion of the room, with a few (okay a metric ton) more books and toys on display. What is not pictured is the huge, piled collection of boxes containing hidden Christmas toys for the kids that I had to keep moving so they wouldn't be in these pictures, or the pictures to follow. 

See more close-up shots of the cave after the jump!

League Time Again: Shelf Expression

Hey kids, it's that magic time of the week again when the League of Extraordinary Bloggers come a-callin'!

What's the topic this week you ask?

"Post a photo of a shelf of items that displays your love for pop culture."

Well, it's funny, because I was actually just working on some pictures of the new Geek Cave since it is OFFICIALLY FINISHED and ready to be revealed... so it just so happens I have some shot of a shelf or two... but instead of tossing in pictures of every shelf in my cave today, I thought I'd just give you a taste. 

So here it is:

Click it. You know you want to.
Go on. Do it. Click it hard.
Yeah... 

What you're looking at is probably the worst picture of anything ever, but it's a huge cross-section of geekdom out on proud display. You'll see everything fro naked mole rats to ironic superheroes like the Tick and Darkwing... to Duff Beer and Pixar All-Stars... to robots galore, cuddly aliens, muppets, and video game villains. Oh... and of course the books. 

Here's a bonus shelf for those of you who'd like to see one more (I'm just so excited to show off the Cave, honestly...)

This one is almost as bizarrely varied... what with the Star Wars Galactic Heroes, Californian Raisins, Action League GL Corps, and Halloween characters all proudly keeping each others' companies. This is technically a shot of the back of my desk, but there are little shelves there, so I'm totally counting this. 

I'll be doing a full-fledged reveal of the new Cave in all its entirety in the next few days, so keep your eyes peeled!

Now see what the shelves of the other Leaguers have in store:

- Hobgoblin of the Monster Cafe shows off a few different shelf-fulls of excellent toys!

- Brother Midnight is BACK! And over and Green Plastic Squirt Gun, he's showing off a shelf from his misty history. 

- Over at That Figures, we get a glimpse at a stunning glass case with one of my favorites: Marvel Superheroes!!!

- Random Nerdiness is all about the Masters of the Universe, and is a book collector after my own heart!

- Meanwhile, Reis over at the Lair of the Dork Horde has me green with envy over his sweet Funko figures... especially the McDonald-Land figures!

I'll be back with more Goodwill Goodies soon! Until then, Happy Hunting! 

This Will NOT Be Me....

More content coming up soon. Prep and recovery for and from Thanksgiving is taking longer (not to mention a stomach flu working its way through the family).

In the meantime, I am trying desperately not to become this guy:

I'll be back soon with more Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Hunting!

A Few Things I'm Thankful For

Just a quick one to prove I'm not dead,.

With Thanksgiving coming, I thought I'd mention that I am thankful for a great many things: 

My new home, my three beautiful kids, and my wonderful wife. 

I'm thankful that I'm in a relationship with someone who may not always understands why I'm obsessed with the things I'm obsessed with... but cares about me being happy in my obsessions. With that in mind, she may not see the point in spending money on the things I spend money on... but that doesn't mean she won't spend money on things (she doesn't see the point of)... if they make me happy. 

With that said... my birthday was in October. I didn't talk it up because I really wanted to focus on the Halloween Countdown... but now that's over, and I've been dying to blog about my birthday gifts. 

There was a trip to Goodwill in Bangor as a part of my birthday OF COURSE. We also hit Target and Toys R Us, and there were a handful of self-bough birthday gifts I picked up for myself in the course of the day, including this :

First up my trip to Goodwill turned up this awesome find of a silo filled with Fisher Price Little People farm toys for .99 cents!!! You'll notice I took the picture on a Halloween background because I was considering sharing this post as a part of my countdown, and then changed my mind. I was sooo excited to find these toys, as I now have some people, animals, and accessories to display with the Farmhouse I fixed up. 

See even more great Birthday finds...

And see how I tenuously tie this post to Thanksgiving after the jump!

League of Extraordinary Bloggers: What if...?

Hey kids! It's League of Extraordinary Bloggers time once again!

This week, our topic is this:

What if…? — Write an alternate turn of events for a pop culture storyline.

So what story would I give the What if...? treatment to? I kept thinking, and I kept thinking... and one story kept springing to mind. It's a story that I would have gladly rewritten myself if given the chance:

But honestly starting to write, I think I just kept trying to fix all the problems I had with LOST, instead of exploring any unexplored avenues of storytelling. And WOOF were there some problems to fix. So... never mind. I want to have some fun, and explore some untapped storytelling. Like... What if the X-Men lost Inferno? So I'm losing LOST and I'm going for something more funtastic!

So my next random idea was this: 

See my big idea after the jump!

Pay-Day Friday 10-28 Part 3 (The Final Chapter)

No idea why I felt it should take me two weeks to post about the stuff I bought last Payday Friday (Payday Friday came and went this weekend with NO trip to Goodwill... I'm slipping... but I did buy some stuff, and do some stuff, that I'll post about soon...) but this is the third and final installment detailing that trip to Goodwill. 

First up is this Scooby-Doo Trick or Treat pail. I know it's not terribly remarkable, in and of itself, but it was the last one I needed to complete my set of 3 and I paid .99 cents for it instead of having to pay Happy Meal prices for it... and since it was the first one out in our area, I couldn't have gotten it any other way. So... I was pretty pleased to find it donated to Goodwill so soon after it was released. 

See the rest of the last after the jump!

Payday Friday 10-28 Part 2

All right back to the Payday Friday adventures!!! This is part two of a post I started back here. It was a mega payday Friday filled with two days and three stores. It was a wild bacchanalistic orgy of Goodwill shopping. Well, there's a sentence I bet you never thought you'd read... 

As I mentioned last time, there was some last-minute Halloween shopping happening that day as well. Here's a little green Halloween Troll doll I found in a grab-bag with some other great stuff (shown after the jump). I don't usually care about Troll dolls one way or another... but this guy's okay. I think he's meant to be a Frankenstein's monster Troll... but he's also throwing off some major zombie vibes. He's the exact kind of balance between cute and Halloween-y that I tend to enjoy. The grab-bag he came out of cost me .99 cents, so any additional Troll reservations I may have had disappeared when I saw the additional contents of the bag.

See More After the Jump!

I Won a Firefly Book from Cool & Collected!

I've been meaning to post about this for AGES but with the Halloween Countdown wrapping up, and so much other stuff going on, I kept having to put it off. But now it's time to shout it from the rooftops!

I won an amazingly beautiful book about the TV show Firefly from Brian over at Cool & Collected!

I am a Whedonite, pure and simple. The one Joss Whedon property I do not care for or about is Dollhouse, and I'll admit I never watched more than a couple episodes of it, so I could be totally off base. My love affair with almost all things Whedon began with Buffy, moved over to the occasional episode of Angel, knocked my socks off with Astonishing X-Men, broke my heart (in the good way) with Dr. Horrible, and later (much too much later) Firefly pistol-whipped me in the face and took a few teeth with it. Then of course The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods came along just to stop my heart and put the nails in the coffin. 

So when Brian announced he had this stunningly gorgeous book: Firefly: A Celebration from Titan books (it is a collection of material from three different Titan books dedicated to the show) up for grabs, I knew I HAD to own it. And... now... thanks to Brian... I do. 

See More of the Book After the Jump!

Payday Friday 10-28 Part 1

Shaking off the post-Halloween doldrums has not been easy. But I've redressed the blog, and redressed my house, and redressed my spirit as well. I've decided to roll with the fact that Christmas EVERYTHING is out in stores now, before Thanksgiving is even really a thought on the wind. 

But that doesn't mean I'm totally DONE with Halloween yet. I went out on Payday Friday, October 28th, and had my last hurrah picking through the swiftly disappearing Halloween merch in the shelf space already being taken over by Christmas items (I looked through the Christmas stuff too, because hey, I love Christmas when the season is actually HERE... and I have to prepare for my Christmas countdown, all right?) I considered saving what I picked up for next Halloween, but decided that seemed crazy. 

And just to make sure things went down AWESOMELY... my Payday Friday extended into Saturday, with a trip into Bangor and Brewer to hit those Goodwill stores as well. So this is a 3 store haul y'all. But that also means that I'm going to have to break the post up into a few different installments. 

So let's stop standing around chatting about our feelings and get down to business, shall we? 

First up here's this cute little Jack O' Lantern Jester who is now packed up with all my other Halloween decorations, but had a good 3 day run on the shelf before then. I love Jack O' Lanterns, and I love Jesters... so this really didn't have to fight too hard to jump into the basket. He was originally 1.99 but since all of the Halloween merchandise was half off, I got this little guy for 1.00. 

See More After the Jump!

2 Things I Learned Thanks to Daylight Savings TV

So thanks to Daylight Savings time this morning I was up abnormally early for a Sunday morning. Actually both my almost-2-year-old and I were the first 2 up and my wife followed along shortly thanks to the clock change.

So we camped out on the couch and explored the myriad options of early morning cable viewing.

It changed my life.

See how after the jump!