Is it a dinosaur? Is it Hulk hands? No it’s a baptism present…

What do normal people buy for their nephew’s baptism? Scifi nephew is being baptised in a couple of weeks time so we recently started to look for a gift. I wanted to get something he can keep but that isn’t the predictable silver photo frame or baby book.

We were walking past the Disney store so Scifi hubby suggested having a look. Thinking we might find a china Kermit or Mickey Mouse I agreed. Cue a typical Scifi hubby moment as he picked up child sized Hulk hands and looked at me suggestively. Since then he’s suggested Tonka trucks, plastic dinosaurs, a Batman costume, and ‘my first Swiss army knife’.

I’m still not quite sure if he was being funny or if he actually thought that our 8 month old nephew would like/appreciate/be allowed any of them. Either way I’m pretty sure Scifi nephew’s mother and father wouldn’t be very amused!

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Pretty Poison Ivy

When Scifi hubby calls me at work it usually means that something is wrong; the cat’s been sick, the dishwasher has flooded the kitchen, that kind of thing. So when he rang me at 3pm on Friday I was slightly surprised that he was excited to the extent he was almost hyperventilating.

I’m not sure what I expected him to be that excited about, winning the lottery or finding out his in-laws were coming to stay perhaps. It turned out that a new Simon Bisley piece of art had come up for sale and he was desperate to have it. Not exactly the ideal conversation to have in an open plan office.

We have some very good friends who run a great comic shop (Reed Comics) a small press comic and who are also friends with Simon Bisley. Biz had drawn a Poison Ivy piece for them a few months ago and we saw it when we last visited. It’s a lovely piece but they hadn’t put a price on it when we were there. Scifi hubby practically stalks their website so he saw it go live and called me instantly wanting to buy it. For once even he thought it might be a little too much money to spend without asking me.

In the end he persuaded me to let him call Reed Comics to see if they would hold it for us until we are next able to visit to pick it up. Thankfully they said yes – so he called me again as he bounced off the walls with excitement. He’s spent the last two days posting the piece everywhere online and telling everyone about it. He’s a bit like a puppy with a new toy.

I must admit it is a lovely piece. Although she’s naked (Simon doesn’t really draw women with clothes on) she’s not completely ridiculously proportioned and it’s a view from behind so not as much ‘detail’ as he often includes. There’s also a very sweet frog sitting on the log with her.

Now we just need to find somewhere to get it framed – and Scifi hubby needs to find a way to show his appreciation πŸ˜‰

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And the peace was shattered by… mini trucks

We’ve had a couple of quiet weeks in Scifi hubby land. There’s been no extreme book buying (at least by Scifi hubby standards), only one trip to the comic shop, no comic cons and relative peace and quiet. I knew it couldn’t last.

The peace was shattered today by the noise of diggers, JCBs and wagons – mini ones. He has discovered a whole world of model/mini trucks where really sad people gather together to move a pile of dirt from one end of a sports hall to the other end using mini diggers. He finally found something that makes the scifi collecting look like something that normal people do.

Cries of “even the indicators work” and “look they’re putting a fire out” have been coming from his end of the sofa. He’s spent a long time describing his ideal mini truck (a tractor unit with a Mercedes Benz wagon on the back). I’m not sure whether I’m meant to pretend I’m taking him seriously or just kill myself laughing. Apparently there are meet ups all over Europe and we really should go along to one…

Luckily he can’t find anywhere to buy them, or a list of events, so maybe I’m safe – for now.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about have a look here on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S99pcVlaQw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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Do dinosaurs belong on ski slopes?

Dinosaurs have their place. They are interesting on the ‘wildlife’ tv programmes, fun in movies, make cute toys for kids and perhaps even belong in my office. I’m less sure that they should be on the ski/sledging slopes. All that crashing around and roaring could start an avalanche surely?

Scifi best friend is currently visiting so we went sledging in the mountains yesterday. She brought with her three t-shirts that Scifi hubby ordered – one for each of us. They are bright green and say ‘Ask me about my T-Rex’ on the front. When said question is asked you pull the bottom of the t-shirt over your head and roar like a T-Rex as the shirts have a T-Rex printed on the inside.

Predictably this resulted in lots of dino antics on the slopes. Luckily no avalanche but one crash with a skier (not dino related and not serious), several encounters with snow drifts (dino ‘racing’ apparently) and lots of aching muscles and bruises for Scifi hubby and Scifi BF this morning. I’m fine but then I didn’t try to beat the mountain in quite the same way they did. The mountain won.

Showing the t-shirts to my parents on FaceTime last night they both looked puzzled until Dad finally said ‘They mean T-Rex not T. Rex’. A little more explanation and the generation gap became clear – he was thinking of the Marc Bolan 1960s band and couldn’t work out why we were all roaring!

20130217-082109.jpgScifi hubby and Scifi BF roaring like loonies on the slopes

Romance Scifi style

Valentines day with Scifi hubby is always an interesting experience. He’s a romantic a heart but tends to express it in peculiar scifi ways.

This year it’s dinosaurs. The valentines card was a work of scifi perfection…

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He met me at work this afternoon and brought three ‘friends’ with him as a gift. A spinosaurus, a brachysaurus and Batman riding a 22 inch T-rex – with sounds. Apparently they need to sit on my desk at work in order to be happy dinos. I left him in reception and took my dinos back to my desk and my boss helped me find somewhere to put them. Luckily she’s very understanding and finds scifi hubby an amusing subject. I’m not actually sure if this is a good thing πŸ™‚

The dinos with their friends – yes I already had five dinosaurs. He’s been smuggling them into my handbag for years (the Care Bear is a whole other story!).

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The T-Rex won’t fit so he’s currently stalking my neighbour over the office wall.

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At least this year I joined in too and visited the comic shop to buy his present.

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How many books is it normal to buy in a year?

I’d love to know the answer to this question. What is the average? Do men buy more than women? The fans of which genre buy the most? I can take a guess at the last question perhaps – it has to be comic book fans. Scifi hubby has just made a list of all then hardback graphic novels that he knows are coming out this year and that he wants to pre-order. There’s 56 of them.

I’m sure I should be annoyed about this number but I find books much easier to cope with than the rest of the collection. Partly because if you were to ever look at my Amazon account you would see quite how many books I get through in a year. The only thing that irks me is that he doesn’t read them all! I’d love to know what percentage he has actually read. some are even still in their cellophane…

Also keep in mind that this is just what he plans to buy and doesn’t count the impulse purchases, paperbacks, the comics themselves or the oversized, special edition, foil cover, limited edition, costs six times what it should book that he will inevitably find at some point this year.

Last year THE book was a limited edition, oversized hardback of the Walking Dead with a red foil cover. It was only available at New York Comic Convention and in limited numbers. Day one of the con saw us in the scrum to get two copies of the book – one for him and one for his scifi friend Mat. Having achieved that we then dragged these beomoths of books around with us until we found Tony Moore (the artist for the comics) and got him to sign them. Unfortunately he wasn’t sketching but he was friendly and signed one book ‘to Scifi hubby’ and one ‘to Mat’.

Two days later we took the books to be signed by Robert Kirkman. Just getting to see him was a challenge as he was only signing for forty people each day. Luckily our new scifi convention friends Jo and Jen helped us out (thanks guys!) and we had our 60 seconds with the ‘big man’. He signed both books, one ‘to Scifi hubby’ and one ‘to Mat’. Have you guessed the ending yet? Of course Kirkman signed them the wrong way round, so the books were signed ‘To Mat and To Scifi hubby’ and ‘To Scifi hubby and To Mat’. Oops! Scifi hubby had a complete melt down when he realised. Child like feet stamping, pouting bottom lip and “The books aren’t worth anything. I might as well just out them straight in the bin” was the gist of it.

In the end I took the books off him, fluttered my eyelashes at the ‘bouncers’ guarding the queue and got back to see Kirkman again. He was really nice about it, covered the mistakes with drawings of zombies and then signed the books the right way round. Queue total turn around from Scifi hubby when he realised he had something that no one else had. The irony is Kirkman is the writer not the artist so they aren’t the best zombies in the world, but I was definitely the best wife that day!

How much is a piece of plastic worth?

We have a lot of plastic in our house. In fact I think we are probably solely responsible for the profits of the plastics companies. If our house was ever to catch fire I imagine that the environment agency would issue a health warning to nearby residents to stay indoors to avoid the plumes of toxic plastic smoke.

The one advantage of plastic toys is that they are usually just that – toys. They are sold in toy shops and supermarkets and usually very cheap. Ok we have to go through the rigmarole of finding the correct one, picking the one with the most perfect packaging, stopping the checkout assistant simply bashing them together into a bag and then get them home in one piece. Ok Scifi hubby never opens the packaging and they live in stacks in his room. But plastic has the advantage that its cheap. Given the quantity that Scifi hubby buys this is a GOOD THING!

Some of the toy companies have always made collectors editions and we have a range of twelve inch Star Wars and Batman toys, but even the most expensive of these usually only cost Β£20-30. However, there’s now a few companies starting to make ‘toys’ specifically for the collectors market. They used to focus on statues but recently have started to produce plastic toys too. I can just about understand paying over Β£100 for a statue, after all they will last forever – assuming they don’t get dropped. I’m still not convinced that paying that kind of money for a plastic ‘toy’ is a good idea.

Luckily Scifi hubby agrees with me – or at least he did until Sideshow Collectibles announced their new Joker ‘collectible’. I admit it’s a good looking toy. Possibly one of the nicest I’ve seen. With a whole fabric wardrobe – yes Scifi hubby gets to play at dress up πŸ™‚ But really $190? For plastic!

The other annoying thing about these ‘toys’ is that there are only a limited number produced, and the first hundred usually come with something extra special in this case a pair of fish shaped guns (yes really). This brings a pressure to decide very quickly if you will buy it or not. They announce the figure and give pictures weeks before but you don’t know the price until the second that it goes on sale, and they usually sell out in minutes. This really doesn’t help my argument. It also doesn’t help that they are already for sale on eBay at much higher prices, even though they won’t be delivered until September.

Suffice to say that come September we will be the proud owners of a plastic, Sideshow exclusive edition, sixth scale figure, Joker. Oh and it still hasn’t actually sold out.

20130203-130414.jpgI once came home to find Scifi hubby washing his original plastic Star Wars toys in the sink as they had sweated in the heat and needed cooling down I wonder if, in ten years time, I will come home to find him washing this one?

Ooops we seem to have another collection, and this time it’s mine

You know all about my obsession with the Smurfs but I haven’t dared to own up about my fixation with My Little Ponies yet, so confession time….

As a child I had almost all the My Little Ponies. Some were gifts but most were bought with pocket money. In fact my pocket money mysteriously went up whenever the price of My Little Ponies went up – clever parents! I’ ll always remember being given the My Little Pony castle for Christmas one year from my Grandfather. My brother got Skeletor’s castle and he kept stealing my ponies to use them as bad guys. Evil little brother. Then there was the baby ponies which my mum loved most. I vaguely remember drowning them in the bath at some point.

Predictably when I was ten years old I outgrew them. Our school was holding a car boot sale and I sold all of my ponies. I can’t even blame my parents, it was my idea and I did the bargaining on the day. Of course now I, almost, wish I had kept them. Although to be honest they would only be up the attic with the collection of egg cups, rock labels (the bits of paper that come with sticks of holiday rock), school books and all the other jumble!

That was until Hasbro brought out a My Little Pony game for the iPad. They are so cute. They dance if you tap them, play catch with a ball and fly. I’ve become hooked on playing with my ponies and harvesting their crops of lemons and bath towels (trust me somethings really are not worth knowing the details about).

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I had been resisting buying any of the toys. I don’t need them. We don’t really have the space (it’s all filled with Batman). And I already collect Mr Potato Heads. I even resisted buying ‘vintage’ ponies (i.e. the ones I sold) at New York Comic Convention. Somehow all of this fled from my brain when I got dragged to the comic shop this weekend. Just as we walked in the door there was a whole stand of My Little Ponies, including some of the ponies that I ‘own’ on my iPad. Scifi hubby can spend hours in the comic shop so I had a long time to look at them and dither.

In the end I decided to take a leaf out of Scifi hubby’s book with his Hot Wheel cars – he’s now having to buy me a pony every time he makes me go to the comic shop. I ended up with two on Saturday as we went back to the comic shop twice. Any bets on how long it will take for me to have all of them?

20130120-220620.jpgApple Jack and Twilight Sparkle came home with us

Mother’s have a lot to answer for…

I’ve mentioned before that Scifi hubby’s mother used to bribe him with toy cars when he was a child. The deal was that he got one Dinky car every time he went food shopping with her if he behaved himself. He got a surprising number of them. As a teenager he then proceeded to destroy most of the cars. They were target practice, parachuted from the attic window, dropped into the river, eaten by the dog etc etc.

When I started to drag him to supermarkets he discovered that they now sell Hotwheels cars so he had to have one if I wanted him to behave for the rest of the trip. The risk of him throwing a paddy, lying on the floor and screaming or taking all his clothes off (all of which I believe he did when misbehaving as a child) was too high so I caved in and the car obsession restarted. Somehow the number of cars necessary to make him behave has increased over the years – it cost me 111 Hotwheels over Christmas! On the plus side if I lose him in the supermarket I know I will always find him in the toy aisle somewhere near the Hotwheels.

However, what do you do with that many toy cars? He does at least open the packaging for them unlike the Star Wars and Batman toys. Apart from a couple of hundred cars which fill our glass topped coffee table, we now have a few thousand cars filling up boxes in our house.

My mother has always had a large glass jar which she kept a collection of sugar packets in. Scifi hubby has had his eye on it for a while now and keeps joking with her that he would get it when she died (not necessarily the best joke to have with your mother in law!). She surprised him this Christmas and gave him the jar with a ribbon on it.

Being slightly obsessive about these things Scifi hubby can’t simply throw all the cars in. No, he has to take the pole from the mop, put a lump of blutack on the end and lower each car individually into place. At least I talked him out of trying to colour code them. Even so, this could take a while but he’s a very happy ‘boy’…

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Twelve days of Scifi hubby

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2013! I’ll do a post looking forward to what’s coming up in 2013 soon but after silence for a few days I thought I’d fill you in on twelve days away with Scifi hubby in true Christmas style…

    On the first day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    An Iron Man power band (his main Christmas present although I think he actually prefered the children’s toy version of the power bands which he also got!),

    On the second day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Two Hitchcock sketches (David Hitchcock is an amazing artist that we are friends with. He gave Scifi hubby two amazing pieces he’d done of Batman with the Penguin and Batman with the Joker. The Penguin piece in particular is beautiful, Batman is fighting Penguin in the Iceberg Lounge surrounded by evil looking penguins),
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the third day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books (to mention just a few!),
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the fourth day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Four Batman pillow cases (and a kingside Batman duvet cover – thanks Mum!),
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the fifth day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Five bottles of booze (Dad took pity on Scifi hubby and bought enough alcohol for Christmas to be easy),
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the sixth day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Six jars of mayonnaise (I know this sounds crazy but we can’t get Scifi hubby’s favourite brand of mayonnaise where we live so we’ve come home with six HUGE jars of the stuff),
    Five bottles of booze,
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the seventh day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Seven hours at the comic shop (We have some wonderful, long suffering friends who run an online comic shop. We went to visit for a couple of hours, stayed until 1am, ate them out of house and home and then spent far too much money on yet more comic books),
    Six jars of mayonnaise ,
    Five bottles of booze,
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the eighth day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Eight balloon hats (my mother’s idea – a kit for making balloon hats. Some hilarious results and a very scared cat),
    Seven hours at the comic shop,
    Six jars of mayonnaise ,
    Five bottles of booze,
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the ninth day of Christmas, Scifi hubby got
    Nine lead Batman figures (he’s been collecting one of these 120 part magazines which come with lead DC figures. Unfortunately they won’t post them to our house so they all end up at my mother’s. She stacks them in a great pile in the guest room and we collect them when we can. Thankfully this series has just finished, unfortunately there’s a new series starting on Batmobiles. Shhhh Mum doesn’t know yet…),
    Eight balloon hats,
    Seven hours at the comic shop,
    Six jars of mayonnaise ,
    Five bottles of booze,
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the tenth day of Christmas,
    Scifi hubby got
    Ten Batman questions (we had a 13 hour drive home and Scifi hubby doesn’t drive so he decided his role was to keep me entertained. Sadly this seemed to mostly involve a Batman quiz app on the iPad which asks ten multiple choice questions about the Batman universe. There’s several problems with this, first, it’s timed so he couldn’t read out the answer options leaving me to guess every time. Second, the app seems to only have about forty questions so over the course of a few hours even I learnt the answers. Third, he felt the need to explain every answer I didn’t know in great detail so I now know the backstory for Joker (the Red Hood), Harley Quinn (a psychiatrist) and Jason Todd (stole the wheels from the Batmobile). Finally it’s Batman so risks making fall asleep anyway!),
    Nine lead Batman figures,
    Eight balloon hats,
    Seven hours at the comic shop,
    Six jars of mayonnaise ,
    Five bottles of booze,
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the eleventh day of Christmas,
    Scifi hubby got
    (One hundred and ) Eleven Hot Wheels cars (Scifi hubby’s mother has a lot to answer for – she used to buy him a toy car every time they went food shopping. Somehow this has become a Hot Wheel car whenever we go into a supermarket, and this holiday got he got a little out of control!),
    Ten Batman questions,
    Nine lead Batman figures,
    Eight balloon hats,
    Seven hours at the comic shop,
    Six jars of mayonnaise ,
    Five bottles of booze,
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band.

    On the twelfth day of Christmas,
    Scifi hubby got
    Driven Twelve hundred miles (hmmm maybe an massive underestimate but it fits the lyrics and I’m fed up with this song now I don’t know about you!),
    (One hundred and ) Eleven Hot Wheels cars,
    Ten Batman questions,
    Nine lead Batman figures,
    Eight balloon hats,
    Seven hours at the comic shop,
    Six jars of mayonnaise ,
    Five bottles of booze,
    Four Batman pillow cases,
    Three Judge Dredd Case files books
    Two Hitchcock sketches,
    And an Iron Man power band!

Now he’s just got to work out where to put everything…

Happy New Year!

20130104-211053.jpgDay two, part one

20130104-211132.jpgDay two, part two

20130104-211206.jpgDays one and ten

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