I’ve added another My Little Pony website link to my blog.  It’s Ponyville.org , created by Space of MLP Arena.  The website keeps track of all the numerous Ponyville sets released by Hasbro, plus their photos and some brief info on some of the Ponyville sets.  I find this Ponyville website very useful and I use it too.  Thank you Space for your contribution to the My Little Pony online community!

The first month of 2009 is almost over.  Although I feel that overall I’ve not achieved much with my life, at least I’m pleased to note that I’ve pretty much improved on overcoming procrastination in many things I do.  I just need to more disciplined in my time management so as to complete my daily scheduled tasks on time. 

Now that January has come to an end, I’ve got to plan for February and review my overall goals for the year and longer term.  It’s quite daunting to keep to schedule and remain focused on my goals, but I know it will all be worth it.  The end rewards are enough to motivate me to press on and excel!

1) Your immediate living space is filled or rather packed with your toys.  That includes your bedroom, the dining or living rooms, and even your car!  Do beware of putting toys in your car cos they might fade when exposed to sunlight for too long.

2) Your PC, laptop and mobile phone wallpapers are all photos of your favourite toys, or are at least the animated pictures of your toy characters.  You also have the habit of taking interesting toy photos with your mobile phone or digital camera whenever you go.

3) Your work desk at home or in the office are ‘decorated’ at least a few of your toys to please yourself at work, and also to show everyone who walks past what your hobby is.  Some colleagues might tease you for it and some bosses may not have favourable opinions.  If your boss or colleagues happen to be toy collectors too, then good for you!

4) You spend the majority of your online hours surfing the internet for more or the latest information of toys you collect.  You read toy blogs, visit toy forums, check out toy websites selling toys or gather news of latest toys releases, and toy events etc., on a daily basis.  Your close circle of online and offline friends are mostly toy collectors!

5) You make at least a weekly ‘pilgrimage’ to the departmental stores at Orchard Road and other suburban malls to check if their toy departments have stocked up with the latest toys you want.  You also know which days of the week the departmental stores bring in new toys to re-stock their shelves.  You even give your contact number to the store staff to call you when new stocks arrive so that you can rush down immediately to check out their new stuff before other ‘competing’ toy collectors come along.

6) You visit the weekly Sunday toy market at China Square Central almost every week or at least once a month to see ‘what’s new’ there.  Your regular toy sellers there will also inform you if they have the toys you want.  Now you have new daily-opened dynamic toy place to check out and that’s at Toy Outpost.  This place never fails to surprise me with new things whenever I visit it.  I just spotted Bolt plush toys there yesterday.

7) You dream about your toys in your sleep.  What you think about frequently during your waking hours will tend to appear in your dreams too.  Sometimes you even ‘believe’ that your toys can ‘come to life’ and talk to you, or have their own lives and adventures in your room when you are asleep, or not around.  When you reach this stage, you are super obsessed already.

8 ) You start to conjure up and write fanfics about your toys.  You give them personalities and have them interact with other toys to ‘tell a story’.  I think most collectors only do this in their minds.  Some will feature their toyfics on their blogs with well-shot photos and interesting dialogue.  Others have filmed toyfic videos using their toys (E.g. My Little Transformer).

I wanted to write more but I’m exhausted already.  So I end this blog post here.  The more I write about this topic, the more “crazy about toys” I feel I am.  Incidentally, this was my very first header title for my blog!  So do you feel that you are “crazy about toys”?

1) You run out of all available shelf space.  As long as there is any horizontal space on your table, chair, cupboard shelves and even on your bed, piano, TV,  etc.  If the space can fit a toy, it would be used and filled with your toy displays.

2) Your bedroom room floor is stacked with boxes and plastic bags of your latest toy purchases that you have no where else to pack to.  Soon you’ll hardly have any walking space left.  Even the floor space under your table and bed are not spared and have been fully filled.

3) You even used up all the storage space on the upper shelves of your wardrobe and on top of your wardrobe.  Usually those space are meant for storing seldom used items like luggage bags, extra bedsheets and quilt covers etc.  Instead, you have filled them up to the brim with your boxed toys.

4) You collect 2 pieces of every or most toys.  One is to keep Mint-In-Box (MIB) or Mint-On-Card (MOC), while the other is to be removed from its packaging for play and display.  When you own about 100 toys, you actually have 200 toys and so on. 

5) Your storage space has spread beyond your own bedroom or hobby room.  Rightfully if you share your home with other people, you should keep your personal possessions such as your toy collections in your own room only.  If your room cannot not contain all your toys, then you either have to downsize your collection or get a bigger home.  Of course, it’s no problem if you live alone and the entire home is your personal space to use as you please.

6) Your store room, basement, attic or garage are also used to store your toy collections.  These places are usually not suitable for storing your toys and they might cause your toy conditions to deteriorate over time.  Do your best not to store them there as you may even forget about them for many years.  By then, it might be too late to ’save’ them.

7) Your toys get in your way when you need to reach for your everyday items like the clothes in your wardrobe, the things on your study table, the books on your shelves, etc.  It can get a bit inconvenient, even to the extent of a little annoying when you have to shift those toys aside each time you need to reach for the things you want to use.

I’m pretty sure that there are more observations that show you have way too many toys in your collection.  These are some of the most common ones I can think of.  How about sharing other observations that I have left out?  Feel free to leave your comments here! 

Today’s the eve of Chinese New Year.  Like last year, I’ll be taking a break from blogging from 26-27 Jan 2009 and will resume blogging on 28 Jan 2009.  That’s also when many of the departmental stores here re-open for business and when they also have their post-Chinese New Year sales!

Here’s wishing everyone Happy New Year, plus Great Wealth and Happiness in the coming year of the Bull!

This My Little Pony Ponyville single pack - “Scootin Along with Scootaloo”, came out in the stores here since early last year.  At that time, I thought I wouldn’t want to collect the Ponyville series, hence I did not pick her up when she was still plentiful. 

It was only near the end of 2008 when I decided I want to collect all the Core 7 My Little Pony Ponyville characters, did I start hunting around Singapore for this single pack where Scootaloo comes with a cute scooter.  To me, she must have her scooter to suit her namesake. 

At long last and after many months of searching, I finally found her this week at a department store that still sells some of the old Ponyville stocks.  I spotted her by chance while randomly looking though the Ponyville single packs. 

Actually I didn’t expect to see her after going through months of fruitless searching.  She was the only piece left, lucky me!  I even managed to get a discount for her due to an ongoing sale at the store, double lucky me!!  Yes!!! 

Just earlier this month, I attended a Fengshui (a.ka. Geomancy) talk given by our Singapore’s famous FenghsuiQueen - Master Lynn Yap.  It’s about the Fengshui Predictions for the Year of Bull 2009, plus the overall luck of people born under each of the 12 Chinese Zodiac signs.  Her presentation slides are now available at Slideshare.

At the talk, each of us received a door gift and this year we all got a cute little Bull figurine.  There are 4 different designs and I got the one holding the gold ingots.  The others are holding a prosperity scroll, a giant coin and a jade Ru Yi.  The Bull figurines are also dressed in ancient Chinese vests.  They have bushy eyebrows and bushy cheek beards, making their heads look a bit like those of Chinese dragons.  They sit on many ancient Chinese coins which form the base.

Then I went to Chinatown early this week and found this unique-looking charging Bull figurine and picked it up as well.  Its body is covered with ancient Chinese coins, much like the scales of a carp.  It has raised bronze-colored coins on the shoulders and hindquarters, and a jade Ru Yi for a tail.  Overall, it’s a very interesting body design.  Like most of such auspicious animal figurines, there are loads of more ancient Chinese coins and gold ingots which form the base.

Although there were many pieces to choose from at the shop, most had rather bad painting so I took a really long time to select the ‘best’ piece before I headed for the cashier.  Picky, picky me, haha…

My first Bull figurine that’s holding the gold ingots is sitting on top of my TV in the living room.  Now I need to find a suitable place to display my charging Bull figurine.  Oh yeah, I need to get some real grass to ‘feed’ these 2 lucky bulls too!  Prosper!

You can tell how obsessed I am with my San Diego Comic Con 2008 Exclusive Pony (I call her “Ninja Pony“) by the number of posts that I have devoted to her so far.  She also won my inaugural “Top Favourite Toy of the Year” award in 2008.  Do you know that your toys can become obsessed as well?  Here’s a little trivia to share with you: -

Just last month, I was addicted to a Korean historical drama series called “Il-Ji-Mae”.  It’s better known as “Yi Zhi Mei” in Chinese.  It’s basically about the life and adventures of a young Robin Hood-styled chivalous thief who robs from the rich, and then distributes the loot to the poor and oppressed peasants. 

He’s nicknamed by the peasants as “Il-Ji-Mae”, which literally translates to “a stalk of plum blossom”, because he always leaves a small painting of a stalk of plum blossom behind at each crime scene to taunt his rich victims.

Now my Ninja Pony also became obsessed with the show and she starts to believe she’s “Il-Ji-Mae” too.  For weeks she had been pestering me to get her a stalk of plum blossom as her copycat trademark tool.  Now that Chinese New Year is just around the corner, there are many stalls selling big branches filled with lots of plastic plum blossoms here, but I didn’t want to buy a big branch just to get a small stalk for her.

Hence I decided to be really cheap and scoured the grounds near the flower stalls to look for discarded small stalks.  I was lucky to find one very small stalk with just one plum blossom attached to it.  It looks good next to my Il-Ji-Mae pony and now she’s so happy with her little plum blossom prop that I have peace in my ears at last!

If you’re keen to purchase an “Il-Ji-Mae” pony, I have a MIB one (minus the plum blossom stalk) for sale at my online toy store.  Go see how she looks like mint-in-package and with her original box!

Il-Ji-Mae DVDs (20 episodes in Korean & Chinese dialogue with English and Chinese subtitles), are now selling at our local TS VCD stores for only SGD 19.00 each.  You can just go buy the DVD instead of watching it online!