Here’s an interesting article that I came by some time ago and bookmarked for my blogging material reference while wanting to clutter clear my stuff.  Although it’s a very short article, the few comments on the blog page do add further insight to the topic.

So if you are thinking of quitting your toy collecting hobby some day because you finally can’t stand the toys cluttering up your once “showflat” looking home, and also due to severely burnt pockets plus family pressure, you will need a new past time to use up the new free time you will suddenly have because of a new void in your life.

Learning a new skill such as playing a musical instrument (as suggested in the article) is a good idea.  If the new skill you plan to learn can help you to earn another source of income (as suggested in the comments section), that is even better!

Last but not least, if you are really serious about not collecting toys anymore, or rather collect less toys from now on; stay away from all known “poisonous” places that sell and display the toys you used to collect!  The less you get reminded of them, the lesser you are likely to feel the addiction again.

Enjoy your new hobby!

Another year quickly draws to an end!  It took me quite a while to gather and reflect all my toy thoughts for 2011.  What can I say?  That 2011 is basically just another period of yet more mindless pursuit of more toys to add to my already overpopulated collection, spread over 12 months!  So am I happy with how the year went for me?

Well I have long wanted to quit this toy collecting hobby, but I obviously didn’t succeed.  This is mainly because I haven’t really found something else to take its place.

Ever since I started blogging about toys in Dec 2009, I had been gradually downsizing the toy collections that I had lost interest in and I did managed to sell off a sizeable part of my collection.  However along the way, I also bought new toys that caught my interest.  Fortunately the new toys were fewer in numbers and the new toy purchases were spaced much further apart than before.  Hence overall, my toy collecting pace has slowed down by a lot, which is good!

G4 My Little Pony

This has been a very exciting year for collecting G4 My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic (FiM) toys, ever since they started appearing in local departmental stores in Q1 of 2011.  My fellow local pony collectors and I had been following the news and were envious of the early retail release of G4 pony toys in the US in 2010.  We were then naturally very ecstatic to find them here as well and wasted no time buying the “mane 6″ pony characters, way before the local kids and other fans were introduced to these ponies when the FiM cartoon was screened on Okto Channel in Oct 2011.

LEGO

The local retail release of the 2nd series of LEGO Kingdoms sets in July this year revived my waned interest in LEGO and got me excited for a while, until I finished building them all and stored them aside in boxes.  I also became briefly interested in the new LEGO Aliens Conquest sets and added them to my collection too.  Now I’m still wondering if that was a good idea.  I still like them, but I feel guilty that I strayed from my LEGO collecting goals of focusing on medieval LEGO sets only…

Masters of the Universe Classics (MOTUC)

2011 marked the year that I finally completed my modest collection of MOTUC figures that I intend to collect.  I have the MOTUC He-Man, Battle Cat, Adora, She-Ra V1, She-Ra V2 and the massive Swift Wind (added in Nov) at last!  Maybe if Mattel makes Adora’s horse Spirit, I will get him too in 2012 or whenever he gets released.  These are very expensive toys which I bought as MOCs and MIBs, so they are all I can afford to have, for now.

Unanticipated Gundam Invasion!

Just as I have been painstakingly reducing my massive toy collection over the year, this is also the untimely period when my husband plunged into the “rapid growth” stage of collecting Gundam model kits!

I blame myself for letting him accompany me to the toy sections of departmental stores whenever I popped in to check out the latest ponies and other toy releases to blog about.  He somehow revived his childhood interest in Gundam and in the last 2 months, it had been a downward spiral for his $$ and my emotions!

He keeps reassuring me that he only buys them at massive discounts from both retail stores and online sellers, but he doesn’t seem to detect my built up stress at seeing the more than 30 boxes of unassembled MIB Gundams cluttering up our room!

I had strived so hard for the year to clutter clear my home and room, only to see other people’s clutter build up all over again!  And if you collect Gundam, you will know that each HG & MG model kit can take up to a week or more to build, assuming that you can only build on weekday nights after work and on weekends if you don’t go out.

My thoughts for 2012

All I can say for now is that I better find a new non-physical item collecting hobby in 2012 and further cut down on impulse toy purchases.  Recession is coming again and I can’t guarantee if my income will remain the same in the coming months, much less for the whole year.  I have to cut down on monthly expenses and set aside more funds and savings for rainy days, and perhaps a new addition to the family.

Oh gosh, just typing this paragraph alone is starting to stress me up!  But don’t let me dissuade you from your own toy collecting goals, for everyone has different targets for the new year.  So you go on and pursue yours while I carry out mine.  Adieu 2011 and Happy New Year 2012!

Q1 2010:

Up to the first half of 2010, I was still very much into collecting the latest toys of the toylines that I was interested in. 

In January 2010, I snapped up quite a number of the G.I.Joe movie toys that were on mass clearance sales at many departmental stores then.  It was a bountiful harvest time for G.I.Joe toy fans and I was estatic to have gotten the figures and vehicles at that opportune time!

Q2 2010:

Then I started getting obsessed in wanting to complete the LEGO castle sets that I missed out many years ago.  And so I went on a shopping spree, both online and at physical shops to hunt down all those missing sets that I wanted, for don’t know what crazy reason.  It was just a sudden intense period of unexplained obsession back then. 

Q3 2010:

This period was spent building up and reviewing a number of the LEGO Castle sets that I bought a few months before and being pleased that I acquired them despite lots of effort.  But fatigue gradually set in from all that LEGO building, photo taking and online toy reviewing, that my mad craze over LEGO finally waned.

Q4 2010:

Gradually my toy collecting pace slowed down a lot in the closing months of 2010.  This was mainly because I began to run out of proper physical storage for more toys.  Hence I had to collect less or forgo buying some of the toys I had originally wanted.  In a way, it became a good thing in the end because I realised that many of the toys that I skipped having, were really impulse toys to me after all.  So that’s a relief!

My thoughts for 2011:

I shall still continue blogging about the latest news on the toylines that I normally blog about, mostly about Transformers, Marvel Universe, G.I.Joe, My Little Pony and other Hasbro toys and such. 

2011 should be an exciting year for Transformers movie fans, as the third installment of the movie - Dark of the Moon (DOTM) is expected to be screened in cinemas in July 2011.  There will surely be lots of sneak preview photos of DOTM toys being released or leaked online to drive fans and collectors crazy again, like it happened in the months before the ROTF (Revenge of the Fallen) movie release in July 2009.

For the G.I.Joe movie sequel, the filming plans seem to have stalled for now, so I don’t expect the sequel to be ready this year, which is fine with me.  There will be plenty of other toy distractions to take its place.

If I have complete control over my thoughts, impulses, emotions and obsessions, I would rather embark on a new lifestyle in 2011 rather than continue collecting even more toys to restart the vicious toy collecting cycle all over again for another year.  But I know that my human mind is weak when it comes to temptations and discontentment with what I already have.  Hence 2011 is likely to be another challenging year for me if I want a change.  Nevertheless, I will still up keep this toy blog as long as I have not left this hobby.

Happy toys collecting everyone, and Happy 2011!

My clutter clearing today went according to plan and I managed to gather 3 bags full of unwanted paper and other stuff for recycling or throwing away.  It feels good to spend my weekend this way.  I felt a kind of relief that some stuck energy is finally going to be released, instead of stifling me in it.

I still have some more clutter to clear out tomorrow and then I plan to do some long overdue re-arranging of furniture to their rightful places.  Some furniture are currently in the unsuitable parts of the house because my mom was reluctant to let me throw out an old computer table some years ago.  It’s the type with the sloping table top that was specially designed to put the old bulky PC monitors, instead of the flatscreen PC monitors that we see everywhere today.  The highest shelf above the monitor shelf is for the printer.  Yeah I know, I still have this piece of antique furniture at home!

That old bulky desk top computer had long been recycled away but its table remained for about 4 years more because my mom kept insisting that it’s still usable.  I relented and used that table to put lots of miscellaneous items. I also specially have a large piece of custom sewn cloth to cover it from the top and all the way down to the floor because I can’t stand seeing its ‘out of place’ appearance in my room.

I’ll manage to get help to carry that obsolete ‘giant’ out of my room by next weekend.  Hopefully the neighborhood rag and bone men will want to take it.  The wooden shelves are pretty much unusable except as woodchip, but the stainless steel frame and legs will make good recyclable material.  Now I can’t wait for next weekend to come! 

Yes, I’m about to harden my heart and break all emotional ties I have with some of my unwanted stuff this weekend.  They shall be separated into 2 bags - to be recycled or to be thrown away. 

There are some things where hardly anyone else would like to even inherit them for free, much less to sell them away to for cheap.  Hence I shall treat such clutter as food gone bad and cannot be salvaged, rather than think about how much they had cost me when they were brand new many years ago. 

If new things keep coming in, older stuff have to be removed from my home to keep a balanced cycle, since I can’t stop buying new items.  And so the vicious buying and discarding cycle continues for me to the end of the year, and most likely into the new year, and the years to come, LOL!

…If you had visited my blog a couple of days ago, you would have noticed that you had no access to it at all.  My apologies for the non display of information during that frantic period.  My blog was indeed down after my failed attempt to upgrade my Wordpress version.  As it turned out, the latest Wordpress version isn’t compartible with the current template that I’m using.  Hence my blog couldn’t load even though all my years of data were intact.

I have to clarify it had nothing to do with my webhost provider.  Nevertheless, they were very swift in their solution replies to me but being unfamiliar with technicalities, I couldn’t really grasp everything they mentioned.  But in the end my blog was restored and I’m relieved to get it back online again.  Basically I had to uninstall that latest incompatible Wordpress version and re-install the old version that I had been using all this while and that was it!

Thinking back about when my blog first disappeared from my domain, I had indeed panicked for a while but as the hours went by, I was kinda prepared to accept the possibility that nearly 3 years of blogging posts could be lost forever.  I had done my back up but because I couldn’t see anything online, it sort of felt that everything had been lost already…

Then a wave of calmness swept over me as I sat there and I felt a kind of “release”.  After all I had been like a “slave” to my blog almost daily for the past few years, as I strived to post something everyday.  Then I gradually had nothing much new to mention about toy collecting, hence I started to blog on alternate days since last month.  

This new alternate day blogging is a much better arrangement for me and I hope my readers are well with it too.  I don’t know how long more am I going to continue blogging about toys, but at the moment I am still going on with it.  Who knows like many toy collectors and bloggers I know, this is going to be a life long hobby for me!  Happy toy collecting and blogging everyone!

Learn to let go of your toy collections when the time comes to move on in life - Despite your beloved toys being a major part of your life for the past ’x’ number of years, there might come a time in some people’s lives where they find new interests or have changes in lifestyle that do not accomodate a toy collecting hobby as much as before. 

If you reach such a stage in life, just go naturally with the flow of your new found lifestyle and let go your toy hobby.  Embrace your new life and move on.  You might just find better rewards there.  Your toys had served you well in the past ‘x’ number of years and it’s time for them to serve a purpose in other people’s lives.  So let go most of them while keeping a handful as souvenirs of those particular memorable years of your life.  Happy living!

Yes I’m now officially a “Mrs” after being used to years of being called a “Miss”!  The horses above are my ring bearers during my marriage solemnization at the Registry of Marriage (ROM) today - the white and brown stallion represents my husband who is born in the year of the horse, while the brown mare represents me who love horses.  The 2 horses are still tied together till now!

I will be going for a short honeymoon in Australia (Gold Coast) next week.  Perhaps I might bring a toy along this time for photo taking at the various places of interest that I’m visiting, or I might do some toy shopping and bring home even more toys from there, LOL!  I can’t help it, after all looking for toys wherever I go is a habit I have developed for many years already.  I shall take photos of my trip and post them here when I return!

Meanwhile, happy toys collecting everyone!

What every newbie should know about toy collecting - You can read them all in my previous blog posts in the Toy Collecting Tips Series to get an overview of this hobby that is so easy to get into, but takes up to a lifetime or more to quit!  They are now archived for easy reference and reading in my “Articles” page.

I’ve written this blog for nearly 3 years and have been collecting toys for almost 2 decades.  Everyday I tell myself that I should slow down and eventually quit this hobby, but it hasn’t been successful.  I’ve begun to explore other suitable hobbies to take the place of toy collecting, and one recent new hobby seems quite promising, but it’s ultimately not a total solution.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my toys, but I just want to be less obsessed with this hobby than before.  Now I wish to be more of a casual collector, according to the 5 stages of toy collecting!

Don’t encourage your friends and loved ones into any sort of collecting hobby.  Haha, that is if you care for them.  If you don’t then I’ve got nothing more to say, LOL!  Collecting hobbies are easy to get into, very addictive, heavy on expenses (mostly money spending and rarely money making), very time consuming; and worst of all, they are usually lifelong for nearly all collectors!  

Most collectors can never ever get out of their hobbies voluntarily (because they have become too emotionally attached to their collections and collecting lifestyle), unless *touch wood* something drastic happens in their lives that makes them quit the hobby for good. 

While some moderate collecting is fun and enjoyable, and even serves as a bonding topic with other people, too much of anything is never good.  The trouble is that most collectors will eventually end up over collecting.  Hence, don’t ever get into collecting anything if you can help it!  For the people who are already collectors like me, we’ve got to live with the choice that we had made and the issues that come with it!