Cool & Collected’s Winter Break Recap

Don’t listen to the rumors, I am still here! I took a hiatus for the last 10 days and virtually disappeared from the digital side of life. Christmas is the one time of year that I actually kick back and relax. Being self-employed, vacations are a rarity, but no one else is working over the Christmas break, so I can usually take the week off without being missed. We had a wonderful Christmas here in Virginia, and I hope you did as well. Tis the season of sharing, so here are some of the highlights of my holiday…

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without model trains. This is the first year I can remember that the Greenberg Train Show didn’t come to town in December, but luckily we have a local church that puts on a smaller show that is totally kid-centric, with a huge LEGO train setup alongside the traditional O-scale and HO-scale model train layouts.

The LEGO train setup has a fun scavenger hunt where the kids have to find a couple of dozen golden bricks hidden in the display. if you find all the gold bricks, you get a prize, which was a white horse figure this year.

Driving around after dark, our neighborhood put on a pretty good show with the holiday lights, but this year’s Clark W. Griswold award goes to this guy…

I finally got around to putting together the 1966 Batmobile model kit that I picked up at a yard sale over the summer.

Seeing all those great model train layouts, and building that Batmobile model got me motivated to head to the workshop and create something. I plan on working on my toy photography more this year, and wanted to create a multi-use backdrop to make the photos a bit more interesting. Here’s a peak at what I came up with…

I’ll be posting details about how I created this monstrosity, so stay tuned. I could hardly wait for the paint to dry before taking some pictures. Here’s an example…

Christmas was excellent and Santa was very good to this collector, bringing some new books and some old movies…

Amazon wish lists are the greatest thing ever. I put all kinds of books about toys and collectibles along with a selection of old movies on my list and was pleasantly surprised at the fun assortment that found its way under the tree.

I watched a bunch of movies, with Rise of the Planet of the Apes being by far the best, and Suckerpunch the lowest of the low. I am amazed at how a movie with such a large budget and so much imagination could be so astoundingly dull and dumb.

Santa brought all kinds of toys for the kids, but the most fun item had to be this Skylanders game. The 10-year-old in me watches with awe as these little action figures come alive on the television screen when they were placed on the “portal of power.” I’m going to review this in depth later, but let me just say that the concept of this game is incredibly fun (but expensive!).

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Hopefully, it won’t be as long before I write another post. So how did Santa treat you and yours this year? Did anyone get anything totally cool? Let’s hear it!