While I got in a fair bit of gaming this weekend… it was far from the major mission at hand. We had decided some weeks back that over spring break we would rehabilitate our lawn. We had been putting this off for some time as evidenced by the mountain of yard waste that is now sitting waiting for the city to pick it up. Our city has two options for lawn waste the first being get a red bin and then in essence pay rent on it all year round. The other option is to go to a local QuikTrip store and buy some very pricey special bags emblazoned with the city name on them that denote that the it is going to some sort of a yard waste recycling plant.
Unfortunately I just looked up on the city website…. and it appears that yard waste collection will not resume until April 9th meaning these bags will be hanging out on the side of my house a little longer than I expected. It was a pretty weekend however and allowed us to get things under control before the real growth seasons starts. The funny thing about this is you can see all of the leaves that make up this mess… were gathered in a lawn with no trees. Our back yard seems to be the catch all for all of the houses that do have trees.
The real mission of the weekend however was to reconstitute our back patio that opens out from our bedroom. This is my wife’s happy place and I wanted her to at least be able to spend some of her spring break out there reading. This was in fact something she managed to do a good chunk of Saturday given that I took Friday off in which we did most of the work. I will admit I like hanging out here too but mostly in the evenings when we have a very long shadow hanging out and covering the patio area. I am rather fond of hanging out and listening to the wind chimes while watching the birbs.
This year I do plan on spending a good deal of time out here either playing the Switch or 2DS XL, both of which are really solid outdoor gaming options for me. I had originally hoped that the WiiU would have been functional for outdoor gaming but unfortunately the receiver was not strong enough to penetrate the door to the bedroom where I had it hooked up for awhile. I am still grumpy about how lousy the range on the handheld unit is, but with the advent of the Switch it was essentially what I was hoping the WiiU was going to be.
While it is still a little early to set out the “flower babies” we did set up a feeder for the birbs and within a day our backyard was humming with activity. We’ve seen a nesting pair of mourning doves pictured in my hastily zoomed in phone camera shot, a pair of cardinals, a male blue jay and a myriad of smaller birds that I don’t know the names of. We had a fungus infect our two red tipped photinias last year and while we attempted to fight it with some spray…. we lost the battle and ultimately had to take out the two dead bushes that had grown into the size of small trees.
I was afraid this lose of cover would decrease the amount of activity we saw in our back yard, but weirdly enough it seems to have actually increased the amount of time the birds are out and roaming around visibly. The focus seems to have shifted away from hanging out in the bushes to hanging out on our back deck, which would probably a problem… if we actually used that back deck. It is way too far removed from the house to really be convenient and you have to cross over to the other side of the pool to even get up on it. So as a result we tend to mostly forget it exists other than our old set of lawn furniture being up on it.
A good chunk of the weekend was spent happily watching the birbs hanging out in our yard and also watching them completely drain one of the two feeders we have this year. I can already tell that we need to find two things this year… firstly a proper bird bath so they have a place to get a drink or wash off. Secondly we need some sort of a ground level vessel for water because we traditionally have bunnies in our yard quite a bit given that we are not likely to chase them off. Nothing depresses me more than having to fish a dead animal out of the pool because they were trying to get a drink. So my hope is to place something else to get a drink from more prominently… and I will just fill it when I am watering the flowers in the evening. All in all though, happy to have the patio back open for business.
While I got in a fair bit of gaming this weekend… it was far from the major mission at hand. We had decided some weeks back that over spring break we would rehabilitate our lawn. We had been putting this off for some time as evidenced by the mountain of yard waste that is now sitting waiting for the city to pick it up. Our city has two options for lawn waste the first being get a red bin and then in essence pay rent on it all year round. The other option is to go to a local QuikTrip store and buy some very pricey special bags emblazoned with the city name on them that denote that the it is going to some sort of a yard waste recycling plant.
Unfortunately I just looked up on the city website…. and it appears that yard waste collection will not resume until April 9th meaning these bags will be hanging out on the side of my house a little longer than I expected. It was a pretty weekend however and allowed us to get things under control before the real growth seasons starts. The funny thing about this is you can see all of the leaves that make up this mess… were gathered in a lawn with no trees. Our back yard seems to be the catch all for all of the houses that do have trees.
The real mission of the weekend however was to reconstitute our back patio that opens out from our bedroom. This is my wife’s happy place and I wanted her to at least be able to spend some of her spring break out there reading. This was in fact something she managed to do a good chunk of Saturday given that I took Friday off in which we did most of the work. I will admit I like hanging out here too but mostly in the evenings when we have a very long shadow hanging out and covering the patio area. I am rather fond of hanging out and listening to the wind chimes while watching the birbs.
This year I do plan on spending a good deal of time out here either playing the Switch or 2DS XL, both of which are really solid outdoor gaming options for me. I had originally hoped that the WiiU would have been functional for outdoor gaming but unfortunately the receiver was not strong enough to penetrate the door to the bedroom where I had it hooked up for awhile. I am still grumpy about how lousy the range on the handheld unit is, but with the advent of the Switch it was essentially what I was hoping the WiiU was going to be.
While it is still a little early to set out the “flower babies” we did set up a feeder for the birbs and within a day our backyard was humming with activity. We’ve seen a nesting pair of mourning doves pictured in my hastily zoomed in phone camera shot, a pair of cardinals, a male blue jay and a myriad of smaller birds that I don’t know the names of. We had a fungus infect our two red tipped photinias last year and while we attempted to fight it with some spray…. we lost the battle and ultimately had to take out the two dead bushes that had grown into the size of small trees.
I was afraid this lose of cover would decrease the amount of activity we saw in our back yard, but weirdly enough it seems to have actually increased the amount of time the birds are out and roaming around visibly. The focus seems to have shifted away from hanging out in the bushes to hanging out on our back deck, which would probably a problem… if we actually used that back deck. It is way too far removed from the house to really be convenient and you have to cross over to the other side of the pool to even get up on it. So as a result we tend to mostly forget it exists other than our old set of lawn furniture being up on it.
A good chunk of the weekend was spent happily watching the birbs hanging out in our yard and also watching them completely drain one of the two feeders we have this year. I can already tell that we need to find two things this year… firstly a proper bird bath so they have a place to get a drink or wash off. Secondly we need some sort of a ground level vessel for water because we traditionally have bunnies in our yard quite a bit given that we are not likely to chase them off. Nothing depresses me more than having to fish a dead animal out of the pool because they were trying to get a drink. So my hope is to place something else to get a drink from more prominently… and I will just fill it when I am watering the flowers in the evening. All in all though, happy to have the patio back open for business.
This is going to be a really odd post but one that I sorta feel like I want to make. I have a deep and personal bond with Mister Rogers Neighborhood that I am not entirely sure if I can put into words. I grew up the only child of two very busy parents with no other children within easy access distance to me because we lived just far enough out of the city limits to make everything awkward. For the most part I say I was raised by my grandmother, because she was my babysitter and playmate as a child. The problem with that however is that she was the anchor of a very busy rural household, which meant there were larger swaths of the day where she was out doing chores. I mean this is a woman I can regularly remember going out to chopped/split wood for the stove to keep the house warm while grandpa was out tending to the cattle.
As a result there were large swaths of the day where I was left to my own devices, and essentially had to learn how to keep myself entertained. I was the first person in my family to get cable television… and even then I did not get that until I moved to college so as far as programming went I was limited to the four over the air networks. It was at an early age that I developed an affinity for PBS or the Public Broadcasting Service and regularly would sit there in the floor of my grandparents living room soaking up everything I could find while doodling and inventing nonsense. Without a doubt the only show I never missed however was Mister Rogers Neighborhood, because it had a way of bringing me into that world.
I felt like I was friends with Mister Rogers, Handyman Negry, Mister McFeely, or Lady Aberlin… as well as X the Owl, Henrietta the Cat or Daniel the Lion. For thirty minutes I was sucked into this other world where not everyone looked the same as me but still managed to get along perfectly. This was deeply important to my upbringing because I lived in what you might say was a quietly prejudiced world and thought Mister Rogers neighborhood it allowed me to build up a bit of an immunity to having any of those thoughts root deeply in my brain. His mission to drill into our brains that we were all the same inside and that we should celebrate the interesting differences is something that served me well and that I have tried to never betray.
Then the other night after a normal day in the office, I sat down to start doing what I sorta refer to as “checking into the world”. One of the things that crossed past my eyes was the above trailer for a new movie about the life of Fred Rogers called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and as I sat there watching it… I started tearing up to the point of just water pouring out of my eyes. Hell as I sit here writing this post this morning I am teary eyed as well. It is impossible to put into word accurately how much this man meant to me… and how much the show Mister Rogers Neighborhood did. He took what was an otherwise solitary childhood where I sat alone for hours at a time finding ways to entertain myself… into a constant voyage of discovery as I anxiously awaited the moment when the show would be on again and we could do more interesting things together.
I made a comment to this effect the other night on Twitter and my friend Gryph commented that there was a Mister Rogers Neighborhood marathon going on over on Twitch. This was a night when my wife had gone to Dallas and I was ultimately waiting up for her to get home safely before going to bed. So from about 10:30 until around midnight I sat there watching old episodes of the show reliving moments from my childhood. By the time my wife got home I had to explain why my eyes were so teary because there were so many moments that just hit me in the gut. Example the above image is from when Lady Aberlin forgot to come pick up Daniel Lion for a party, and he thought she didn’t love him anymore.
These were important lessons to talk about with kids, and to help them work through complex feelings of frustration and abandonment… giving us ammunition for dealing with those things when we experienced them later in life. I am far from normal, but I feel like I am a better person because of the lessons we learned every day after school from Mister Rogers and the crew. The role Betty Aberlin played has to be highlighted and appreciated because she had this way of treating those puppets as though they were the most real people in the world with their own complex needs. Without her and her presence in the land of Make Believe it would have been harder to get sucked into the world because of the way she carried the interactions with the puppeteers.
If you were too young to experience Mister Rogers Neighborhood… which is a realistic concern given that I am 41 almost 42 and was part of the prime viewership… I highly suggest you check it out. There is something magical and timeless about the experience and it has been interesting to see the outpouring of goodwill and support on twitch chat. This is normally a community that can be offensively toxic, but instead everyone is reveling together in just how pure and good the experience is. There was a mystical quality in the primitive nature of the show and its extremely low production budget… but in many ways that also is what sells the experience and makes it so easy to let your imagination fill in the gaps. Excuse me while I try and find something to dry my eyes.
The news about Toys R Us closing is not shocking given the rapid slide over the last month or so… but still hits me fairly hard. The truth is I didn’t go to the store that often anymore because quite frankly it was inconvenient. I did however take the opportunity on a regular occasion to visit them while roaming around other towns. I’ve been to at least one Toys R Us in San Antonio for awhile while we were down there for Pax South, but in that case it was largely because it was beside a Container Store my wife wanted to go to. I think ultimately everyone stopped going to the store for their various reasons, and this is yet another step along the chain to the loss of brick and mortar retail as a whole. It does however make me nostalgic about the Toys R Us from my past.
I found this image online, and decided to use it because more or less this represents the Toys R Us I remember from my childhood. The closest location for me was roughly an hour from my home and it was a destination location for whenever I had birthday money to spend. The reason why is that because as a kid it felt like Toys R Us had literally everything we could ever want to play with. You would go there and see toy lines that you didn’t even know existed, and for the ones you did know about… they usually had one of every figure in the line along with all of the accessories you had only heard about.
As my passion for Star Wars, GI Joe and the Thundercats turned to Video Games… Toys R Us became in a way more elevated in my mind as a destination for glory. During the heyday of the Nintendo Entertainment System they stocked what felt like every single game available for the system. For those who were not around during this era I found an image online representing how games were presented to us. There would be essentially the cover of one of the games with maybe some information about it on the backside hanging on a rack with some tickets. You would dread getting to the store and seeing an empty envelope hanging beneath the game you were looking for. I remember a few sad trips up to the redemption booth to ask if they maybe had one more copy of whatever game I was wanting somewhere in the back.
Regardless any time I managed to save up enough money to get a new game… I was immediately pestering my parents to see when we could next make the hour long slog to Tulsa and visit Toys R Us. I remember feeling like the Ticket Booth was a magical portal that had a copy of everything ever in existence… rather than just the entrance to the stock room. The core problem with the Toys R Us equation is that they made their name on being the “Biggest Toy Store There Is”. That meant to keep the promise they needed to stock more of everything to be that go to place when someone can’t find something anywhere else.
The problem is the “Children’s Bargain Town” slogan was mostly a lie, because as soon as I understood the concept of money… I understood that everything cost a little bit more at Toys R Us. In my market for a good chunk of my childhood there were was a single Toys R Us location. During the late 80s and early 90s they built a second location in what seemed to be the next up and coming area of town. However at no point was Toys R Us the bargain option. On the value for your money spectrum you had Walmart as the cheapest place you could buy anything followed fairly closely by K-Mart and Target being roughly the same. From there you jumped up to the Mall offerings of Circus World and KB Toys… and in a far distant end of the spectrum you had Toys R Us. I remember when Nintendo was king, a game at Toys R Us cost roughly ten dollars more than a game at Walmart for example.
Since they could not compete on price, they had to compete on the sheer nonsense amount of stuff they carried… but in the mid to late 90s that equation changed to. They started clearing out sections of the store to hollow them out and make room for the Babies R Us Franchise. In our store this meant that no longer did they carry products that you had never heard of… or in most cases even the entire product line for the ones you had heard of. Also it was around this time that the Video Game section was ejected from is prime real estate and shoved into a cubical in the far corner of the store the furthest location from the door. Additionally they shifted away from the ticket system and started carrying far fewer items meaning that they lost their sheer selection advantage over other stores. I remember trying Toys R Us first a few times like when Final Fantasy III (VI) came out… but finding them completely out of stock and having to move on and ultimately pick it up from Target.
As they lost selection advantage it felt like they started pushing more and more for product advantage by strong arming producers into creating a plethora of “exclusive” lines available only at Toys R Us. The problem is that this was ultimately a losing battle as well because for example in my metro area at our height we had 2 Toys R Us locations. On the other hand we have around twenty Walmart stores and about half that number of Targets. If you expand that out to the United States as a whole… the amount of products that discount retailers purchase and stock as compared to specialty toy retailers has to be staggering. So following on the heels quickly similarly exclusive product offerings started showing up in Target and then not long after Walmart diluting whatever advantage you once had. Sure you could get a collector into your store to buy that one product, but it was likely they were ONLY buying that and then moving onto another location where the money stretched a little further.
The up-swell of GameStop and Best Buy during the 90’s put a nail in the coffin in product offering advantage Toys R Us might have had on the video games front as well. Why would you go to Toys R Us for what was already a limited offering from their glory days… when you could just go to GameStop and find the return of carrying every available product offering for each console? Every one of these missteps hurt Toys R Us long before online retailing came in to take the final chomp out of it. Unfortunately the “biggest toy store there is” crown now belongs to Amazon. Why would you drive from store to store to find the one action figure you want… when you can just place an order online and get it shipped to your door in two days time?
On the video game side we have a wide array of digital store fronts allowing us to plunk down our money… and get a game within a few minutes rather than needing to throw pants on and drive to the store. For me personally the convenience is king over anything else. I could in theory purchase some of the games cheaper in physical form from Amazon and have the discs shipped to me in two days. However I would rather just have the game installed and always “on tap” rather than needing to fiddle for the disc or figure out which case I shoved which game into. In truth I am having a hard time remembering what the last game I purchased in physical form was. More than likely it was World of Warcraft Cataclysm collectors edition, and even then only because they had not yet started offering digital collectors editions of their games. From Pandaria onwards I happily gobbled up that digital CE and went on with my life rather than trying to hope and pray that Amazon would ship the game on time for me to hit the midnight start.
On consoles it is even more important to me personally to have games digitally, because when I take my switch or 3DS somewhere I don’t want to juggle a bunch of awkward cartridges… nor do I want some sort of a “cozy” that I carry around with me to keep them organized. I want the ability to flip to the game I want, hit a button and boot directly into it with no muss or fuss. Since at least 2007 I have been 99.9% digital in my game purchases, and each one of those sales is in theory one that could have gone to a retailer like Toys R Us. I am part of the problem and I am absolutely part of why this store is closing.
I have a deep nostalgia about my experiences with Toys R Us as a kid, but the adult version never quite lived up to those memories. While I would like to think I am still a Toys R Us kid at heart and can break into song singing the theme… I never had kids of my own to continue the tradition with. Additionally shopping at the physical store is inconvenient and requires a trip to a completely different area of town than I visit on a regular basis. Before the second store closed a few years ago… I used to go to that one occasionally because it was easy to get in and out of without a lot of hassle. I remember semi-regularly visiting when I was looking for Lego Minifigures blind bags and even finding some ones stashed from an ancient series.
The problem is… I maybe went there once a month if that and prior to the blind bags… it had been maybe five years since I had darkened the door of that store. I will miss the Toys R Us from my memories, and this absolutely feels like one of those “end of an era” moments. However it will join the same memory bin where Babbages, Software Etc, Media Play, Hastings, Circuit City, Computer City, Comp USA, KB Toys, Circus World and countless other stores I liked going to… but no longer exist. Part of getting older is remembering fondly things that don’t exist anymore… and I guess after a decline that started decades ago… I am okay with adding Toys R Us to that stack.
