Halloween Day 24: More Brewer Finds

Another trip out to the Brewer Goodwill yielded a much smaller crop of Halloween goodies this time around, but some other great finds were made... so let's see what I brought home! 

At first, I couldn't figure out what these first two items were... and then it dawned on me that they were tiny cactus plants-holders! Someone had long-ago let the cactii die in them, and then donated them to Goodwill. Did NOT matter to me as I was more than willing to remove the remains of the long-gone plants and use these to populate my little Halloween village. The first one here features a skeleton and a gravestone for "Hairy Scary".

I much prefer this one though, featuring an evil tree hugging a terrified jack-o'-lantern. I want a hug too. I bet this guy gives out free hugs all DAY long.

The final genuinely Halloween-y item of this trip was this little ceramic tree complete with ghost and jack-o'-lantern. No cactus remains involved here, just a nice little addition to the Halloween village. 

Still half-in-and-half-out of Halloweentown, we find this copy of the Mad Scientists Club, which is a collection of short stories from the 50's and 60's that originally appeared in "Boys' Life" magazine, featuring the same group of boys each time. A strange sea monster appears on the lake...a fortune is unearthed from an old cannon ...a valuable dinosaur egg is stolen.... don't these all sound at least mildly Halloween-ish? Huh? Huh?

Before George Michael became a bathroom predator he put out some pretty great music. I grabbed a copy of "Faith" on cassette, and a copy of the Top Gun Soundtrack for my cassette collection!

A Mork and Mindy novelization to add to my collection as well! I have a Fotonovel already, and now I have a true chapter book about Mork from Ork!

I have gone on endlessly before about Rick Yancey's novels on the blog before. I already own a copy of this very book in fact, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp. I loved it. So when I found a copy of the book that is the same SIZE as the other two books in the series, I snapped it up. I actually am kind of vaguely sorry that this kind of symmetry even matters to me... but here we are. Anyway, this story has to do with a loser of a kid who finds himself plunged into a life of danger and intrigue because of a connection to a society descended from the knights of the Roundtable. It's all pretty awesome.

I bought this grab-bag pretty much just for Luigi in his Mario Kart... but let's be honest, I wanted the sailor cat with an eye-patch too, even though I know he's from a PBS Kids show. Cats with eyepatches are cool. I didn't mind bringing home a Battle-Shell Leonardo either, though I don't collect the Battle-Shell figures and would not have bought it on its own. Mike the Knight? I hate. He will be re-donated. Now onto the mega-exciting find of this trip:

Ta-da!!! The Fisher Price Play Family Sesame Street Clubhouse!!! Now... calm down. It had absolutely no accessories or figures along with it, and there were no bags with those in them anywhere in sight. There was only the play-set... but man is that enough for me!!!

Look at the artwork on this thing! Cookie For President? David + Maria? Bert loves pigeons!!!??? YES PLEASE!!! This thing is in desperate need of a cleaning of course... and I will be cleaning it throughly, believe me... but omigosh the FISHER PRICE PLAY FAMILY SESAME STREET CLUBHOUSE!!! This thing came out before they were even calling them "Little People" people!

C.T.W.!!! Oscar Loves Trash!!! The real joy of this thing is in the details on the decals.

And here behind the slide we can see the doors that surround Big Bird's home. Someone added a random bird sticker sometime long ago too. Now I just need to spend the rest of my life tracking down ALL of the Sesame Street little people (well, besides the ones my wife got me along with the other Sesame Street playset she got me for my birthday a while back...) that go with this thing.

Well, that's it for tonight kids! I'll be back soon with more Groaning Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!

Halloween Countdown Day 14: My Birthday!

10 days later and I wasn't even going to bother with posting anything about my birthday because I didn't really get anything Halloween-y for my birthday anyway... Until today. Wanna see what I got? Let's take a look!

Out of the gate we're starting with the non-Halloween-y stuff, of which the MAJOR gift this year was this set of Disney Infinity Marvel: Guardians of the Galaxy figurines! Before anyone asks: No, I do not own the game... or even a system to play it on. But I LOVE Guardians of the Galaxy, and I LOVE the animated-style of these figures. They are simply stunning, and make a great addition to the shrine I am currently building to the GotG.

Slightly more Halloween-y is this Scooby-Doo PEZ set, which I mentioned during my tour of the Halloween aspects of my Geek cave... so I won't go into great detail here again. BUT PEZ + Scooby-Doo = AWESOME!!!

My daughter got me this book The Infinite Sea which is the second book in the 5th Wave series by Rick Yancey. This author is currently one of my favorites and this series is just GUT-wrenching. 

This set of TMNT PEZ dispensers was a last minute purchase by my wife the night of my birthday. Again... PEZ + Almost anything = AWESOME.

NOW. The inspiration for this post was the fact that when I arrived home today my wife's cousin gave me this awesome pillow from www.Horrordecor.com the creators of the Horror-Buddies line. This Handbook for the Recently Deceased from Beetlejuice is perfect for the chair in my Geek-Cave!!! Gorgeous AND functional!

The pillow came with a bag of (biohazardous) random goodies as well, including a Betelgeuse business card, a postcard of the Farmer from Motel Hell, a banana Laffy Taffy (which I promptly ate) and my favorite part: a random toy evil-clown head.

My wife greeted me with a late birthday present as well. A "Freddy vs. Jason: Forest of Fear Game" from Neca! She found this for four dollars at Mardens, a local chain of salvage and overstock stores here in Maine. Marden's doesn't always have awesome stuff... but when it does... It's INSANELY awesome stuff. Like this.

Here's a look at the Freddy Krueger pieces from the set. I'm loving all three, but if forced to choose I think the Freddy on the right is my favorite. I like worm-Freddy too, but I'm almost always more of a sucker for the iconic versions of characters vs. some sort of gimmick.

Again, if forced to choose my favorite Jason Voorhees, I would probably go with the Jason on the left this time. Although, the Jason in the middle is carrying Freddy Krueger's head, which is pretty badass in its own right. (I apologize for the crummy photographs throughout the post. Not even gonna make excuses.)

On a side note, another MAJOR birthday gift from my wife was a road-trip to three different Goodwills on the day of my birth, as they give you 25% off your purchase if its your birthday and you have a discount card with Goodwill. So I went on a Goodwill SPREE too.

That's it for tonight kids! I'll be back with some Ghostly Goodwill Goodies soon enough. Until then... Happy Haunting!

Halloween Countdown Day 4: My Birthday!

So today was my birthday! I love having an October birthday. I love Fall, and I love that it's the beginning of Halloween seasonl when I celebrate the day of my most holy birth. 

I woke up to pancakes!!! And not just any pancakes: 

A Jack 'o Lantern! A birthday cake! 

A heart! A Halloween cat 

(you can't tell because he's made of pancake, but he's a witch's BLACK cat)! 

Jack Skellington!

I'm not a big fan of birthday cake. I'll eat it, but it's not my favorite. So my wife always makes me a peach and strawberry pie instead! This year, on my pie dead Cthulu lay dreaming!

These are the birthday cards made for me by my kids. The two on the left were made for me by my two little boys (with some help from Mom) the one on the right was made by m 13 year old daughter. Who rocks.

Custom wrapping paper! The three bottom packages were all decorated by my kids. The top pile were all wrapped in some awesome paper my wife's been sitting on for a while. So what did I get?

Rick Yancey books! I talked a bit about why EVERYONE should be reading Rick Yancey's books a little after last year's Christmas. That all still holds true. I now officially own all of the YA books that Yancey has written. They're usually pretty graphic and ghastly... so I have that to look forward to. I probably won't get to any of these until after Halloween, but that's okay.

Some great Halloween-themed gifts! Here we have a novel called Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge, and the AWESOME stop-motion animated film, Paranorman in a Blu-ray DVD combo pack. 

And finally, a couple of DVDs. The excellent faux-80's film Take Me Home Tonight which I can't recommend enough to people who love 80's films... and whuuuaah? Cops and Robbersons? Leonard 6? What Planet are you From? Why did I get this abysmal four pack of movies? Wait... four pack? I only listed THREE movies just now!!! What's the FOURTH one?

Oh. 

Oh yeah. 

I love the movie Vibes. LOVE IT. Can't wait to watch it again and again actually. Not even kidding a little bit... (and actually, I don't hate Leonard 6 as much as most people seem to... it's bizarre but enjoyable for me).

My wife also took me out for dinner at a place called Maine-ly Meat for dinner and I ate my bod weight (which is considerable) in chicke, pork barbecue, baby-back ribs, and hot sausage. With beans, cole-slaw, potato salad, and cornbread on the side. Then we took a handful of boxes home, full of leftovers. Yum. 

So that was my birthday! Happy birthday to me! 

I'll be back soon with more Googly-eyed Goodwill Goodies! Until then Happy Haunting!

Be sure to check out all of the great blogs participating in this year's Halloween Countdown! You can do so by clicking this link, or clicking on the Cryptkeeper 2013 banner on the sidebar to the right! Also, check out the "Blog-O-Ween" Halloween Blog collective, again by following this link, or through the badge on the sidebar! Thanks!

Non-Goodwill Purchases

Not everything the Goodwill geek buys is actually from Goodwill. In fact... not all of it is even second-hand. I do occasionally buy things for full-price elsewhere. Let me show off some of my recent purchases. 

Jaime Hood over at Shezcrafti tipped me off to these Bicycle Zombie Playing cards back in April. I bought them just a few weeks later for myself and I was NOT disappointed. Go check out her review to find out more about them. 

I FINALLY got a copy of Kill Bill Vols. 1&2 on DVD... and then realized for about 5 bucks more I could have gotten them both on Blue-Ray. Sigh. But I'm a big fan of these movies, so I don't really mind what format I'm watching them in. 

Picked up the first trade of Ben Templesmith's Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse: Birds, Bees, Blood, & Beer second-hand at Bull Moose Music in Bangor, Maine. They sell both new and used-but-like-new books/DVDs/games/CDs/everything. I've been dying to check out this series for a long, long time now, about a maggot who controls a corpse like a marionette in a city of supernatural characters... I haven't read it yet but I look forward to it at the very least for the art. 

Finally got around to checking out Brian K. Vaughn's new space-opera-slash-new-parent-rom-com. I feel like this first volume stumbles a bit. It feels like Vaughn is setting absolutely zero limits for what he might include in the story, which just makes every new crazy thing feel a little mundane after a while... and the bits where he shoe-horns in parenting conversations from our own modern society (statistics about gun safety, hemorrhoid jokes, breast-feeding pros and cons) feel a little anachronistic. Overall though I do like the pacing of the story and the characters have been fun. I've heard some of the controversy over the sexual content of the series and I will say that it's weird how much sex is included in a story about new parents on the run through the galaxy. It feels like the creators are trying to work out some sort of issues. 

I picked these up for a dollar apiece from some machines at a bounce-house play-palace place they have near here that we sometimes take the kids to. LOVE THEM. Each of my boys got their own Venom and Thing to play with as well. 

As a big fan of mini-figures as well as Transformers I was pretty excited to find these Rescue-Bot mini-figures at Toys R Us for a stunning 1.99 apiece. I was a huge fan of the Hasbro Robot Heroes line when that was being put out, and now that Rescue-Bots have sort of taken their place it's nice to see some of the characters still getting the mini-fig love. 

While at Toys R Us I got one of these awesome Pac-Man arcade candy tins, which I've seen ALL over the internet, not to mention over at Reis O'Brien's Lair of the Dork Horde. Incredibly cool. 

This zombie clown was .50 cents out of  a gumball machine at a locla Chinese Restaurant. 

At Target I found this set of Marvel Avengers Chibis set. They're adorable and included are all of the Avengers, Loki, Fury, Coulson, and plain-clothes Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and Bruce Banner. There were also a Hawkeye sticker and a couple of chromed out Iron Man and Hulk figures, which I didn't really care about... but pretty. 

A couple of brand new books I recently picked up (At Wal-Mart and TJ Maxx respectively) are Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave and Libba Bray's The Diviners. I love Rick Yancey's books. I have read the entire Monstrumologist series, and the first book in the Alfred Kropp series, and been blown away by everything so far. I hope the buzz surround the 5th Wave isn't just smoke being blown. The Diviners just looks and sounds interesting. So... yeah.

Last but not least are these Slush Puppie candies, which I found in a local chain store called Reny's. Each of these were .99 cents apiece. The fruity tubes are terrible. Just horrible. Rancid tasting actually. The stuff in the middle was sort of sticky and unpleasantly gritty to chew. But I'm saving the wrapper because I love Slush Puppies and I am a hoarder. The cups are inverted lollipops (the straw and the "pile" of slush at the top) and the cup itself is filled with sour powder to dip it in. These will never be opened as it would completely ruin the effect. I suspect they probably taste as terrible as the fruity tubes though. 

That's it for me tonight guys. I'm exhausted from talking about all this wasteful spending outside Goodwill. I'm feeling dirty and guilty and awww... who am I kidding. I love this stuff. 

I'll be back soon with straight-up legit Geeky Goodwill  Goodies though! So until then, Happy Hunting!