Tag Archives: doll collecting

December 15, 2015 · 5:07 pm

Playing With Dolls Again

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Yes, having hoarding disorder can be a pain. I channel it into collecting, especially things like 12-inch action figures and Barbie Dolls. But it becomes such a mania that even the rules don’t contain it. These mint-in-box dolls with mutant big heads and bean bodies are part of a wacky collection that has caught hold of me with about the same ferocity as the flu. They are Monster High dolls to go along with the TV cartoons and direct-to-video movies used primarily to sell these ultra-weird toys to little girls. Supposedly each of the girls in the series is the daughter of a movie monster. Operetta above is the daughter of the Phantom of the Opera. Isi Dawndancer claims to be the daughter of a deer-spirit… a Native-American-style monster thingy. I suppose there is a benign rationalization behind these things other than trying to get little girls to identify with and emulate monsters. Believe me, from my years as a teacher, no little girl really needs encouragement to embrace the monster within. And that sort of thing has negative consequences.

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Yes, the picture immediately above is of my Monster High collection as it stood a year ago. I have now added to it. And am admitting as reasonably as I can that it is probably evidence of looming insanity. Let me show you the new acquisitions from the current collecting year;

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Besides Operetta and Isi, I have added the daughter of the Loch Ness Monster, the daughter of the rat king, and, apparently, the daughter of the man-eating plant from the movie Little Shop of Horrors. What is even worse, there are more dolls out there and available to this collection. I have followed the rules and limited my spending, but I wasted birthday and Christmas money from my mother on this stuff… and probably will do so again. I suppose it is because I don’t spend my toy-money on more manly things like guns and political donations to Donald Trump. But I have to satisfy my lurking doubts with the notion that the most impressive collections of things like this in museums are probably put together by fools like me with raging hoarding disorder.

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Filed under action figures, collecting, doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized

Tagged as autobiography, doll collecting, goofiness, hoarding disorder, humor, Monster High, weird collections

December 6, 2015 · 5:46 pm

The Current State of My World

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I am busy reinventing myself. There are things that have to get done. I have to raise my finances phoenix-like from the abyss I found myself in three years ago after five hospital trips in five years devastated my bank accounts and credit rating at the same time I was forced to retire from my teaching career by health problems. I went through a debt-reduction program with the advice of a law firm in California that has helped me reconcile 35,000 dollars worth of credit card debt. I am nearing the end of that painful belt-tightening process, which can be likened to putting a pumpkin in a vice and cranking the handle tighter than you ever believed was possible, and I did not pop the pumpkin.

Health matters are better too. I am farther away from doom’s ultimate doorway than I was when I retired. No longer teaching has kept me from getting the four cases of the flu yearly that I had become accustomed to when I was in the germ-filled giant Petri dish commonly known as a public school classroom. Lovely Aetna health insurance people decided they would no longer pay for my maintenance medications for diabetes, depression, blood pressure, and cholesterol, so I was forced to cut down and cut out medications. Ironically, the less I take the meds, the better I feel. Maybe… just maybe… I am not going to drop dead tomorrow.

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I am stuck indoors quite a lot, because COPD and not using an inhaler and sensitivity to every allergen in Texas makes for a less than wonderful outdoor experience. So I have taken to reorganizing my library and various vast collections of junk. I am rereading old and beloved books. I am playing with my toys more than ever. I am winning computer baseball games. I just pitched another perfect game.

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I have been painting the house too, when the weather allows, making the outside of things look a little better too. The football Cardinals have been winning. And the Iowa Hawkeyes were perfect up until the narrow loss to Michigan State. 12-1 is still the best they have ever done.

I have recently been able to shave and look a little less Santa-like, though psoriasis is trying to peel my lower face away again, so I will probably be growing my author’s beard and Gandalf hair back again. And I have completed collections and written up a storm. My work is not yet complete on this Earth, and there needs to be a new Mickey in town to clean up this cowboy-infested heck-hole where I live my life.

I know this has been a rather goopy-goose of a post, but I am feeling good for a change, and it is hard to do humor about everything going too well.

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Tagged as artwork, doll collecting, finance, foolishness, humor, novel writing, paffooney, phoenix, teaching

November 6, 2015 · 3:53 pm

Up and Down and All Around

The day I am having today is not one of my best. Ill health, bad traffic, doctor visits, headaches, unexpected expenses, all make a real Monster Mash our of the daily dance of life. But I am happy with recent posts, even though my wife gave me a major eye-roll and huffing sound for posting about girls who fell in love with me. Still, I can’t figure out why my blog traffic is so up and down during times when I feel like my writing is really good. Some of my best posts seem to get the fewest readers, and some of my most embarrassing messes are insanely popular. Ah, life! You are such a Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Roller-Coaster Mystery. But I can write a short post and get away with it today because I have been writing thousand word posts and my 500-word average is in no danger. So, I offer this silly Paffooney picture for you to look at and wonder about. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? And why is Frankenberry looking at Pinky Pie with an expression like that?

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Tagged as doll collecting, goofiness, humor, paffooney, photo Paffooney, Pinky Pie

October 30, 2015 · 2:04 pm

Page-Filler Friday

I have had a monumentally horrible week. And one of the hardest things about it, is that I cannot tell you about most of it and make fun of it for the sake of healing by humor because, after all, real mental health issues are a very private thing. So, I am left with a mish-mash of free-associations and brainstorming to fill up a page with random and unthinkable thoughts. (When I brainstorm, sometimes it is more like a brain-hurricane.)

Under the general heading of; Things a relatively sane older man who is battling hoarding disorder should probably not do is the new collection I started of Sparkling Disney Princesses. As you can see above, I unfortunately acquired some of the more recent Disney Princesses in sparkle form within the rules for collecting (not costing more than $20 and not spending more than $50 in any one month). I even added a rule to slow down the collecting mania. (No buying sparkle princesses of characters I already have in my Disney Princess collection.) Tiana, Merida, and Elsa add up to only $30 over the last three months.

This is actually Cowboy Mickey in the middle of the bedroom he shares with about 500 dolls and action figures, 1000 books, and the fairy in the foreground who is real.

The thing about the relentless doll collecting is more the space it fills than the money it burns. A few years back I completed a five year stint of buying, selling, and trading action figures in which I learned how to make the obsessive-compulsive-disorder part of it turn out to be profitable. I ran a used-toy and collectible E-Bay store that helped me pay for my mental health issue. Of course, I did not get ahead, as all the profits are tied up in the dolls, action figures, and stuffed toys that I have kept. Still, I learned how to do the thing effectively enough to believe I can effectively do that again if I need to, in spite of the fact that E-Bay got wise and raised their fees to make a $5 and $10 business far less profitable.

I should note that I gave up toy-selling on E-Bay after an irate Barbie collector teed off on me in the comments section over a misidentified 80’s Barbie. (Heck, how was I to know that the date on her neck was a copyright date only and not an indicator that she was sold in the 1970’s?) Lady Godiva Barbie on the wingless Pegasus from the Goodwill store is a new project I put on the project table. There is at least a month’s worth of hair-combing necessary and clearly visible in the picture. Mane and tail alone will take weeks.

And I am not yet done with the notion of collecting beautiful sunrises. The recent rains and cloudiness of Texas wild weather have provided some interesting color and variety to the skyline of the park next to our house. It all helps to keep my mind off of troubling issues that developed from dental pain and attendance woes. This has been a very rough week, but the sunrises keep coming, and I look forward to a new day.

Rehab for Disney Princesses

I am in the habit of rescuing dolls from places like Goodwill. I particularly look for the abused or over-loved toys that may be a little bit marked up or a little bit broken. My work table (which was once-upon-a-time a drawing table before being over-loaded with unfinished projects) is loaded with doll parts and beat-up dolls. In the photo Paffooney you can see two naked dolls that I have been working on. One is a Disney Princess, Ariel the Little Mermaid. The other is a Barbie doll with jointed arms and legs, possibly a ballerina in her previous doll life with molded ballet slippers. The fairy in the foreground is possibly a real fairy that I have coerced into lending me some of her magic to help these poor once-loved toy dolls. We are in the process of rehabilitating them.

Now, you realize that Disney dolls are more cheaply made than Barbie dolls (that is important to understanding the evil corporate empire run by a cartoon mouse primarily for hideously huge profits… I love Disney, but it is evil). Ariel has a funky body that has a signature lopsided waist joint. She is proportioned in ways that make her hard to make clothes for, and definitely hard to dress in Barbie clothes. That was intentionally done because Disney is in competition with Mattel and, besides, the basic Barbie body is patented. Disney can’t just steal the entire design.

The thing about dolls is that they are created for little girls to love. And their plastic princess personalities are kinda air-headed. They become easily addicted to the love they get from little girls, and they continue to soak it in no matter what it does to their bodies or how it shortens their potentially immortal plastic lives. Ariel came to me with marks on her legs from black and red markers, and apparently melted rubber bands. I had to scrape and clean her bendable soft-plastic legs with cleaning alcohol (the same stuff I use to reduce anti-electric build-up on the wheels and rails of model trains). Her hair was a sunburned frizzy mess. It looked exactly like you’d expect an addict’s hair to look. I had to start to combing it with a metal dog comb, and then I was able to use one of the human combs I used on my own hair and beard. Finally, I found a cheap Barbie costume that has an open seam in front to wrap around the and seal with Velcro.

I dressed Ariel by stretching the fabric around her (especially the badly-proportioned bosom… dang that evil, sexist Disney design). I only had to twist her delicate arms slightly out of shape to make the dress that was never intended to fit her actually fit. You can see that I still need to find a way to restore color to her sunburned hairdo, but it is plastic, and if no little girl talks her back into her cycle of addiction, I can probably use acrylic paint. Ariel looks much better and healthier than when I found her. Of course, I learned to do this doll rehab bit from having a daughter who played with dolls in a brutal way that apparently required ritual sacrifice and dismemberment. Let me show you one of her Princess Jasmine dolls I saved successfully from addiction and death.

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Tagged as doll collecting, doll repair, humor, Paffoonies

September 23, 2015 · 3:34 pm

Overcoming

When you have six incurable diseases, are a cancer survivor since 1983, and were forced to retire early due to health and income problems, you have probably seen your share of really, really bad, horrible, rotten, no-good, black-hearted, totally-depressive days. Yep, me too. I just made it through a four-day, no-air-breathing illness, potential car problems, and too much work with too little energy to apply to it. But I made it through. I have secret knowledge.

I have restored myself to light and life in a number of ways. One was through happy discovery. I was able to peanutize myself with the help of a movie promotion I have been following on Facebook. http://www.peanutizeme.com/ This link allows you to turn yourself into a Charles M. Schulz comic strip character with Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang. Doing something nutty and foolish is a way to charm and dig and laugh yourself out of depression. It wasn’t all easy and stuff, though. I had to copy my hair and twirl it upside down to get the beard. And I also had to laugh about the chimney growing out of the top of my head like a brick unicorn horn. It’s the kind of goofy stuff that gives a semi-serious artist fits of giggling. So I owe BlueSky Studios not only my thanks, but the link in this paragraph as well. The advertising campaign for the new movie may have saved my life.

Another thing that helped was solving the automobobble problem. My little Ford Fiesta, the Ozzy Osbourne of motor cars, had a heat-fit yesterday in the middle of Lewisville, Texas, Interstate Thirty-Five rush-hour traffic. It developed a seemingly permanent “check-engine” light that threatened an Ozzy at the Alamo moment on the access road. The rush-hour stress built up in me to the point that my blood-sugar dropped and we barely crawled into Taco Bueno to cure it with crispy beef tacos and bean burritos. I have absolutely no money left in savings for more car repairs. So, I crawled into the Walmart oil-change center this morning and pried twenty dollars out of my wallet to get the car-juice sloshed and swirled. Low and behold, after having to sign a waiver that said the problems the car had were the ones it came in with, the new car-juice solved the problem. The engine purrs again and the car has completely forgotten about that “check engine” light, and possibly the biting-the-heads-off-bats thing as well.

So, here is me. You can compare Grumpy-Me to the Peanutized-Me and evaluate whether I appear to be worth saving or not. Notice, I am either holding a newly-purchased Barbie’s little sister doll to add to my maddeningly growing doll collection, or I have managed to kidnap a middle-school girl from Lilliput. I am happy again. At least, I have that old goofy grin again that indicates the pain is not overwhelming… and once again I have overcome!

I should also add that I have been getting work done on my novel, Snow Babies.

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Tagged as autobiography, car problems, depression, doll collecting, humor, illness, overcoming, Peanuts, the Ozzy Osbourne of motor cars

August 31, 2015 · 2:21 pm

The Blue Man

The Blue Faun who represents the lovely melancholy sensuality that informs my wordy little life.

When I was in Iowa last, and had a chance to see the younger of my two sisters, Mary Ann, she told me flat out that she really liked my most recent blog posts and that I should give up all together on my gloomy pessimistic ones. This, of course, was confusing to me because all my blog posts are relentlessly gloomy and never make anyone smile, so I did not know for certain what she was responding to.

As I have shared on more than one occasion, I suffer from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I don’t plan on living more than decade further at my most optimistic, and I told you recently that I am a confirmed pessimist. At worst, I could be dropping dead from stroke or heart attack as soon as I post this silly sour old post. I will be absolutely delighted to live long enough to finish another novel or two and maybe even see them published. I keep close track of my remaining hours because each one is rare and precious to me, even the ones that are quite painful and hard. So gloomy is as gloomy does. I am constantly celebrating that I have lived this long already. How depressing is that? … the celebrating every day thing, I mean?

And of all the people who suspect I might be a fish sticks and custard sort of person, Mary Ann is not one of them. She watches Doctor Who and knows that that is exactly what I am. I am goofy and scatter-brained and a barely contained barrel of weird energy and misplaced enthusiasm. I do stuff like fill my bedroom Barbie shelf with bizarre and kitschy little 12-inch people.

The Barbie Shelf

I appreciate melancholy and being blue, because the hollows of the valleys of depression make you appreciate the giddy heights so much more. And I do realize that I am stringing big words and goopy metaphors together to sound all literary and brooding… but that’s what real geniuses whom I am trying to emulate do to reach the highest heights. They run down through the valley at the fastest possible pace to build up enough speed to shoot up the side of the mountain on the other side. It is a Wiley Coyote trick for using cartoon physics in your own favor. It is the reason I am still tending the flower wagon, trying to coax zinnias into blossoming during the depressingly renewed Texas drought. It is the reason I keep adding to my collection of sunrises. The dark blue pieces of the puzzle of life provide the contrast that help you define the puzzle picture of the brightest sunshine and light.

The blossoms in the flower wagon reached a new record number today, despite the heat.

Sunrise on a school day when I don’t have to go to school because I am retired.

Making Mickey Happy

I have to admit to being a little blue yesterday. Not “literally blue” because most days I look nothing like my Paffooney portrait here to the left. I said a little blue, as in slightly depressed. Not weeping and roaring with sorrow depressed… more like needing to softly sing to myself sort of depressed. I wasn’t depressed for valid reasons. I was mistaken about the writing contest results. The dental insurance also covers more of what we are going to owe for the privilege of having teeth than I was at first led to believe. So my deep blue hole yesterday was imaginary and all see-through-y if I had been sane enough to look properly. But, Mickeys are like that sometimes, getting all bothered about things they really shouldn’t get bothered about.

So, today, determined to still be sad for a reason, I began to list other things that I could conveniently be sad about. There was school news about an 8-year-old boy in Kentucky being handcuffed by an officer in school and crying because it was hurting him. That social media outrage led me to an article about school discipline. “Schools as Punishing Factories” Reading that made me bitterly depressed. I have witnessed the truth of that article in Texas where teachers can get in trouble so easily when they try to advocate for kids, especially black and Hispanic kids. I have seen talking back to the teacher, throwing spitwads, and disrupting lessons become reasons for students to be escorted away in handcuffs. I like to pretend it is because principals and policemen and community businessmen can be rather stupid sometimes, and not because there is a concerted effort to use the school experience as training for black and Hispanic, as well as poor kids to prepare for the second part of their life, the life they will lead inside prisons for profit. As a teacher who loved kids, even the bad ones, I am truly depressed about this trend in America. I have white friends in both Texas and Iowa that want to tell me that I am the one who is wrong, not the system. Their conservatives beliefs are stronger than any eye-witness evidence I can give them. So… even darker blues and more depression. My contest novel is about a teacher like me trying to fight the way things are and teach the way teaching should be done. I must comfort myself by telling myself that my book will change peoples’ minds and make the problem get solved. If I just lie to myself hard enough, like those friends who tell me “throwing money at the problem of failing schools will not fix the problem” lie to themselves… a lie I know is false but want desperately to believe anyway, then I can make it true.

So, how do I make Mickey happy? Well, luckily Mickey is goofy. I went to Walmart and finally found the doll on sale that I had been searching for. I bought Operetta. the daughter of the Phantom of the Opera to add to my Monster High collection for only $9.95. And Mickey is seriously addicted to doll collecting. It makes him happy and turns him away from despair when other things probably can’t. I am not forgetting about the education fight. Oh, no! Mickey’s dander is up on that. And he will bombard you with his writer wrath about that another day. But forgive me. I need to be happy a little right now. And Mickey needs to play with dolls.

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Tagged as discipline in schools, doll collecting, education, humor, paffooney, photo Paffooney, teaching

July 30, 2015 · 3:25 pm

Updating Futzbatter and Foohbah Recipes

Having already written well over a thousand words today on a different writing project, I don’t really have to worry about length on this one. But it is intended to be a scrapbook piece anyway. Thing #1 is the completion of a mini-collection. I now have all three of the main Minions from the new Minions movie. From left to right are Kevin, Stuart, and Bob posing for their picture with their fully pose-able arms in the middle of Cardboard Castle. There are still many many many Minions left to collect, but the first three are the most important bit… I think.

I have now reached the climax of the plot in my Sci-fi novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. I am at that moment in the story when characters, even the most important main characters, may die. I know, in fact, because of the ending that already exists that some of the main characters will die. I am not entirely certain that I know which ones yet. The three I have portrayed here are (left to right again because I am an English speaker/reader and horribly addicted to the same-old same-old) George Jetson, Davalon, and Sizzahl the Lizard Girl. At least one of them has to die for the plot to work out. But which one? I am deeply in love with all three.

My experimental flower wagon has been producing blossoms, but only one at a time. Each one blooms, I take a picture of it, and then the hot Texas sun burns the poor thing to blazes, and I have to wait for the next one to appear.

And finally, I think I need to define the two Mock-Iowegian words in my title today. Mock-Iowegian (as I am sure you are bright enough to already realize) is a made-up language spoken by Iowan farm folks in Mickian fiction where the object is to capture their eccentricities and mock them ferociously because I love them. Futzbatter… noun, meaning things that are fudged or made up on the spur of the moment and mixed together into the overall plan (or impending disaster… depending on the situation). Foohbah… noun, meaning something you tell a fool and expect him to believe, as in a honking-big-fish story, and nobody else will contradict for fear the fool the speaker is trying pull a foohbah on is the hearer, and they don’t want to let on that the foohbah-teller laying the big, fat, hairy foohbah on the group is talking about them, and they are only feebly trying to stop him.

So, there you have it… almost 500 words in spite of myself.

My Own Minions

You know by now, if you have been reading my posts and not just looking at the pictures, that I am a doll… er, action figure… er, toy collector with a raging case of hoarding disorder. So, after finishing the My Little Pony/ Equestria Girl collection, I went on to work on a Monster High collection. I still need at least Draculaura to complete that set. But I stumbled into Minions. I couldn’t resist. “Oh toot jour, Pappagaina!” Stuart said from the shelf. So I had to buy him.

You know how dangerous it is to have Minions. Just look in the background at what happened to the Red Baron when I bought Stuart. Minions can have a bad effect, as well as a funny effect, on the outcome of an evil genius’ evil plots for doing evil-ness. So I started thinking of the dangers. The Minions only cost $8.85 apiece… but of the three main movie Minions, Stuart, Kevin, and Bob… there were already at least three different versions of each. Besides the “bored silly” set, there was a pirate set and a beachwear set. And what if they start issuing all the other minions? You know, Dave and Charlie and all the boys? I could be financially doomed by my need to collect.

And what am I investing in? Here is a close-up of Stuart after taking him out of his mint-in-box to play with him, posing in the cardboard castle atop Mount Blue Blankie where I have built my secret evil genius’ lair. Please don’t tell any would-be heroes or rival despicable villains that my lair is located in my bedroom.

And it turns out that Stuart is fully pose-able. That is going to be even harder to resist. Let me prove he is pose-able.

And after I made the horrific mistake of buying fully pose-able Stuart, I discovered he was not my only Minion. I also found out today that my novel Snow Babies has been assigned to an editor finally. Jessie Cornwell of PDMI LLC was assigned to edit my novel back on June 28th. Of course, I didn’t know about it until today because the email informing me went straight to the spam folder in typical Minion fashion. So now I feel fully ready to face the evil world and try to steal the moon, while actually accomplishing something completely different that I don’t expect. That’s what having Minions means.

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Tagged as doll collecting, humor, Minions, novel writing, photo Paffooney

Tag Archives: doll collecting

Playing With Dolls Again

The Current State of My World

Up and Down and All Around

Page-Filler Friday

Rehab for Disney Princesses

Overcoming

The Blue Man

Making Mickey Happy

Updating Futzbatter and Foohbah Recipes

My Own Minions

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