Toy stories

No, I did not go see Toy Story 3 this past weekend, although I wouldn’t put it past me. An odd kind of detente currently exists between myself and Pixar, wherein I find myself … not exactly avoiding their releases so much as delaying my experience of them, consigning them mentally to some distinct future viewing after an indeterminate amount of time has passed. My wife and I actually went on a date (back when “dating” was the fully descriptive extent of our relationship) to see The Incredibles in the theater, and that was a bonafide good-time-had-by-all. But ever since we brought home our very own bundle of joy, the thought of procuring baby-sitting services so that we could go to the Cineplex so that we could watch, essentially, a children’s movie (and yes I know the glory and genius of Pixar movies is that they work for an appeal to all ages, but still) seems somehow … off. And, on the flip side, having a child in the house means I know that there will be many, many Disney DVD viewings in the future, and in fact I look forward to my little guy achieving both the attention-span and brain-development foundations that mean he can appreciate movies and I can enjoy them alongside him without fear that we’re rotting his brain. So I’ve never seen Ratatouille or Wall-E or Up (I know, I KNOW) but I’m pretty much OK with that, because I’ll get around to them eventually.

But Toy Story 3 seems like an A+ hit that somehow rises above the mere A-level material of its fellow Pixar flicks. And if we see it in the theater we get the 3D experience. (Which, also? I haven’t seen a 3D movie in the theater since this recent craze began with, what, Monsters Vs. Aliens? The My Bloody Valentine remake? I skipped Avatar and everything else. But I confess I’m a little curious to see what the fuss is about, and I trust Pixar’s take on it more than, say, the post-production fad-grab of Cla$h of the Titan$.)

So, no Buzz and Woody on-screen antics this past weekend but toys did still manage to figure prominently over the course of Saturday and Sunday, because this is me we’re talking about here and that is how I roll. On Saturday I took the little guy out for a morning excursion to what I consider the best local comic book shop (“local” being a term I use loosely since it’s more “local to where we used to live” and thus about 45 minutes away). Of course I forgot how late comic book stores open on the weekends, but luckily there is an upscale toy store in the same shopping center, so we meandered around in there for a while. And once again I was confronted with some toys that seemed so cool that I wanted to buy them right then and there, not for myself of course but for my scion and inheritor of my geektastic kingdom.


Your eyes do not deceive you; that is a Playmobil ghost pirate wielding a flintlock and an axe and riding on a giant crab (with claws that open and shut!) and there is nothing not to love about that. It is recommended for children ages 4 and up due to the choking hazard of the weapons and such, and I was only able to talk myself out of the purchase because the first birthday opportunity I would have to gift it to my son is over two years away and that is (apparently) an absurd amount of lead time even for me. Although, honestly, this is the kind of knickknack which even my wife (who is no slouch in either the pirate- or crab-appreciating departments) would find highly amusing. It would find a happy home with us and could be kept up on a shelf for a couple of years and then become a hand-me-down toy, as most everything I collect is bound to do. But down that line of reasoning lies madness and toy-hoarding at levels that might imperil our ability to pay the mortgage, so, again: restraint. Patience of the zen master. All things in good time, and who knows what kinds of insanely awesome playthings will exist when Christmas 2012 rolls around.

As we continued making our way through the toy store we also found a toddler-height wooden train table decked out with all manner of tracks and engines and cars from the Thomas the Tank Engine universe, and that probably could have kept my little guy occupied all day. Back home, the garage is almost completely squared away and one of these months I’ll throw some discretionary income at some kind of workbench tool-organizational structure. At which point, assuming most if not all of the other house-settling projects are completed, I’ll be tempted to see if I can’t cobble together a train table from scratch (I mean, he reached into his sack of famous-last-word clichés, how hard could it be?) because I really see no reason why my child shouldn’t enjoy that kind of thing every single day.

Speaking of the garage, that as workable a segue as any into Sunday, where my Father’s Day treat was many-layered, each of them wonderful. My wife bought me a new propane grill, just in time for summer to truly begin without fear that the old grill would simply crumble into carbonized dust mid-barbecue. The grill came some-assembly-required but honestly I not only don’t mind putting things together, I really quite enjoy it. So on Sunday morning, after my wife has left for work and removed her car from that side of the garage, the little guy and I unpacked all the parts and set to the task of “fixing” (as my boy characterized it) the grill. My able little assistant, equipped with plastic hammer and plush screwdriver, managed to split his time between grill-assembly quality control (following and mimicking the things I did, I assume to make sure that I had done it right) and riding his trike around the driveway and crumbling Styrofoam packing materials because that’s fun stuff right there. I found out later that the salespeople told my wife it would take about four hours to put the grill together, but I managed to do it in about three and get the little guy fed and down for a nap on his usual schedule.

You might worry that my blistering pace meant that the grill was not exactly assembled to all proper specs, but I had the opportunity to test it last night and it performed admirably on its maiden outing. Not that it’s terribly difficult to grill cheeseburgers, but this model also has the side burner feature which was used to boil a pot of water for corn on the cob, and all systems were go. I may be reaching into the cliché-sack again here, but I can’t deny that standing over a shiny new fire-breathing toy, drinking a beer, while my little guy scooted around on the deck on his big plastic dump truck and my wife set the picnic table for dinner, I was deeply enamored with the circumstances.