I grew up in the 1980s, so my memories of playing with toys from that era are filled with Star Wars figures, Transformers, and G.I. Joes. In fact, I often cite the 1980s G.I. Joe line as my last love affair with toys as a child. By the time I was done with them, I had moved on to girls, skateboarding, and punk rock.

I was smart enough to hold on to all of my Star Wars toys, but I guess G.I. Joe broke my heart, so I gave away my collection without thinking twice. My entire stash ended up going to my younger cousin Josh, who lived three hours north of us – and that was that. Apparently he had a good time with them, and passed them along to our mutual cousin Brandon. After he was finished with them, they ended up back in Josh’s garage, where they sat for 20 years.

A couple years ago, my Mom, knowing full well how I feel about old nostalgic things, found them in a musty cobweb-filled box in my uncle Glen’s garage and brought them back to me. Opening that box after about 25 years was amazing! I couldn’t believe how many of the toys were still in decent shape, knowing full well my gender’s propensity to melt, burn, crush, and destroy anything and everything we can get our hands on in our tween years.

3 kids, 3 families, one G.I. Joe collection. Here is how it was returned to me, 25 years later. Not pictured is the Skystriker F14, which is upstairs in my son’s closet as I type this (not sure why I didn’t include it in the pic.). Enjoy!

Every year on January 1st, our little family sits around the kitchen table and talks about the highlights from the year that’s just passed. Then each of us takes a peice of paper, and writes down all of our favorite things from the previous year. After that, I type them up, upload them to Wordle.net, and create a tag cloud of the year. I keep saying I’m going to make t-shirts for us, but hey – we only want to look back a little. Onward and upward to a great 2012!

Check out the tag clouds from previous years…

• Just A Few of Our Favorite Things from 2010
• Just A Few of Our Favorite Things from 2009

Enjoy!

When you have a MacBook Pro delivered, the nice shiny white Apple box comes inside a less shiny brown shipping box. In fact, the Apple box is suspended inside that shipping box by paper corner pads. While I’m stoked that these packaging pieces are recyclable (Apple does pay attention to the impact of its products), turns out they’re reusable too!

I noticed the spacing between the edges was the same width as Thomas the Tank Engine tracks, which are everywhere in my house. When I put the two together, they fit perfectly…then I thought about how I could use them. Sure enough, they are nearly the perfect height to work with the standard Thomas riser tracks. Very cool, and something new for the little ones to be creative with!

We found another purple lego brick! In 2009, I blogged about how rare purple Lego bricks seem to be, so my boys were stoked when they found the single round piece above. We have always wondered why purple Lego bricks were so rare, considering they were one of the “main” colors.

When I did my original research on purple Lego bricks, I found many references to the Knight Bus from Harry Potter. I had always presumed my purple piece came from that set via a hand-me-down box we received from a friend. I recently saw the Knight Bus in a store (pic to the right), so purple bricks should be in circulation again soon.

Why am I blogging about this? I would like to see purple bricks included in basic Lego sets and elsewhere! I feel it’s grossly underrepresented in the Lego world. If you feel the same way, let Lego know!

Loved this old school Kentucky Fried Chicken…

The rest of this DJ kind of looked like Sammy Hagar.

Have you ever seen a purple Lego brick? Seriously, think about it. Have you ever seen one?

A couple of years ago, my friend Rachel gave us a big box of Duplos. We love Duplos, and this batch came with a few regular Lego bricks trapped in the nooks and crannies of the box. I happily integrated the entire lot into our family stash, and went about my business.

Over the next few months, this 8×1 purple brick kept turning up, and eventually it caught my eye. We have thousands upon thousands of Lego bricks, but only one of them is purple. How could this be? Lego bricks are some of the most creative, thoughtful, brain-growing toys out there. Had they simply neglected to make purple bricks? How rare are they?

Apparently, purple Lego bricks ARE very rare! As this Yahoo Answers thread indicates, the missing color has definitely been noticed by fans. I’ve learned that most of the purple bricks in existence probably came from a Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Bus Set. One observant brickhead noticed the purple cone lampshade in the Sunshine House Set. The color is noticeably absent from the Lego online store, so clearly there is some kind of concerted effort to keep purple bricks oppressed – right?

Hey Lego: Set the purple bricks free!!! People want purple Lego bricks, so why not make it happen? I mean, look how happy this woman was when she found some in a Chicago store.

Until Lego can make it happen, feel free to bask in the glory of my 8×1 purple Lego brick:

Since the ’80s, I’ve been using the primitive Campmor catalog as my defacto guide to outdoor gear. In recent years, my purchases have moved online, but I still love getting that tissue-papery off-white zine. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see a giant callout to the @Campmor Twitter account, but there’s still something that doesn’t feel right about it. Should we really be plugged into the Campmor marketing machine when we’re on day three in Bryce Canyon? Hmmm, on second thought, this Twitter addict thinks maybe we should. Have a great weekend everyone!

I still have not read Chris Anderson‘s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, most likely because it is still sitting in my Amazon cart. The book examines the economy of free, and how it is evolving in today’s market. Whenever he speaks on this topic, as I saw him do at SXSW, he always gets grilled about why the book itself is not free (pssst, it is if you want to read it online). It’s not free because Chris needs to feed his family, who are apparently eating really well – Check out the price increase for “Free” that awaited me when I logged in today:

And yes, I’ll probably still buy the book!

These lanterns caught my eye near Chinatown on my latest visit to San Francisco. You can check the rest of my pics in my SF set on Flickr.

Things are still getting back to normal after an inspirational trip to the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. I spent 4 amazing days learning, talking, and building relationships with my fellow social media hipster doofus web geeks – oh yeah!

I got my photos uploaded to Flickr last night, so I went ahead and made an Animoto clip for the photostream impaired (music by Lake Trout). Enjoy!

I took this shot during a family game of hopscotch in the driveway. 

I just got back from the fireworks store where I found this “Twitter Glitter” fountain by TNT fireworks. I couldn’t pass up this explosive which shares a name with the popular microblogging service. What are the odds it goes Fail Whale on me tonight and ends up a dud?

The parking meters around here are such a drag – all gray and utilitarian…like a grumpy uncle. But the meters in Montréal have flair, and flaunt it even on cloudy days. They are cheery, and literally smile for loonies and toonies.

Ahh, another vintage odd-shaped children’s book – and only 29 cents! I found this morsel in the same stack as my Golden Shape Books, and it’s got a whole different vibe and style. This is probably because it was published in 1970, and was printed in the Netherlands (so how did I end up with it in Indiana?). It seems rather rare, as Google is only returning 10 results.*

*UPDATE: Now I’m the #1 result. Nice.

Each March for the last few years, I’ve been throwing down with some of the best designers in amazing PhotoShop battle modeled after the NCAA basketball tournament. I looooooves me some PhotoShop tennis, and adding a format like this makes it extra fine.

This happens over in The Arena at Flashkit.com, where the rest of the year you’ll find typical PhotoShop tennis-style battles happening. The regulars are incredible designers, and this tournament brings out their best.

A pool of 32 entries is seeded into a bracket by reputation, and designers share stock and go head-to-head in a battle of PhotoShop skills. The community members vote on each pairing, and after 4 elimination rounds, the final pairing competes to become the champ. Bragging rights and mad respect are the bounty, but the experience is always where it’s at.

These are my images from round one and two…not even close to my normal output and I pretty much got routed. So as usual, I was in way over my head (I’m 6-4 overall), but that’s what makes it…um, educational!

You can see some of my past March Madness entries here and here, and a couple of other battle images here and here.

While searching for a particular Dr. Seuss book the other day, I noticed there was a wide range of colors on the bindings. Inspired by chotda’s rainbow bookshelves, I quickly threw the Seussian volumes into their proper ROYGBV order (I left all the white ones on the right). Not a mind-blowing display, but Coop liked it!

As a skater, I never stop analyzing every curb, planter, ditch, gap, and set of stairs for potential skatability – even if most of these tempting street obstacles would send me back to the hospital for sure (I’ll stick to the parks, thank you).

Anyway, because I can’t stop gawking at these urban artifacts, they really stand out over time. Waxed curbs, scuffed walls, chipped paint on hand rails – it’s like Luminol on carnage to me.

So when Coop and I walked up the East side of the Ravenel a few weeks ago, I noticed that almost every skateable feature had been hit. The benches have been ground, and the cable anchors have been carved. Definitely an interesting setting for a session, and I imagine the photos were even better.

And seriously, I swear I’m not obsessed with this bridge or anything…really. I’ll post about other stuff soon, I promise!

It’s a fine line, even in Vancouver.

Driving north on I-75, the tundra of Western Ohio is pretty bleak. Rows of harvested corn fight off sticky snow, and the sky already has that gray winter glaze. This is why so many Ohioans move to SC…can you blame them?

Somewhere south of Dayton, a giant red logo caught my eye. LORD. Not just any lord, but LORD in big red uppercase techno typography. I drove on, slightly tickled and more than curious. Turns out to be innocuous, but you always have to keep an eye out…

BTW – how cool is it that they own LORD.COM? Swank.

Last night as the Riverdogs were playing Hickory, I commented to my friend Josh that our seats seemed to be in good foul ball territory. Mid-way down the third base line, just past the covered pavilion.

Then just as our boys were cracking open juice boxes, it happened – A crack and the ball was coming our way. It took a hard bounce down low, then landed three rows in front of us. Everyone kind of froze.

I made my move, and before I knew it the ball was in my hand. I instinctively raised my fist high with its trophy, and my crew howled.

I gave it to the boys, and realized after 34 years, I finally had my first foul ball.

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This message was left on my voicemail about a year ago, but I’ve never posted it here. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t who she was looking for. It’s short…enjoy!

Here’s the .mp3

I love this sticker found on my banana…I wish all branding were this easy.

Since we don’t watch TV with the boys very often, we constantly have our iPods plugged into various devices. They have playlists, but mostly they like to listen to our music. So as we made our way through our nation’s birthday, I made sure they heard some songs about freedom. Here are five of them:

• Freedom, by Rage Against the Machine
• Fight the Power, by Public Enemy
• Get Up, Stand Up, by Bob Marley and the Wailers
• Freedom, by Richie Havens (live at Woodstock)
• Freedom ’76, by Ween (this was just for fun)

The 4-year-old really liked Fight the Power, and I loved explaining why that was important. What’s weird is that I actually think he got it…kids are smart. Since I usually fly my “Don’t Tread on Me” flag the whole 4th of July week, I might as well keep on with the Freedom Playlist…I want my kids to know why this country is important, and why they should stand up against their oppressors when the time comes.

I was going through my browser history trying to find something, when I ran across a Google entry with my son’s name on it. When I opened the page, it became clear what had happened. Apparently he’s taken up egosurfing, and was googling his own name!

OK, so he entered a little more than just his name, but still – what a clown.