Check your exposed Mint-In-Box (MIB) and Mint-On-Card (MOC) toys regularly for possible deterioration from direct sunlight exposure, insects infestation and dust etc. I believe that most toy collectors have long ran out of decent storage space for their toys such that many boxes and packages are kept outside cupboards and carton boxes.  As a result over time, some toy packaging can possibly deteriorate in the above mentioned unfavourable conditions, especially in our tropical climate. 

I have heard of fading colors from prolonged direct sunlight exposure; ants, termites and silverfish eating away cardboard material and making nests in the boxes and packaging; and dust layers so thick that they caused health problems for the room occupants!  Toy boxes stored and stacked up on the floor also tend to impede thorough housecleaning by mothers,  wives, housekeepers; and eventually leads to nagging from them or worse.

The above are the direct and inevitable results of over collecting toys, where we want to collect too many toys but have very little proper storage space at home.  Other than having proper and dust-free storage space for your toys collection, you also need to practise the “one-in-one-out” toys culling method periodically to sustain your hobby.  If not, your toy population will spiral out of control and make you feel frustrated and overwhelmed by this originally enjoyable hobby. 

Hence do take the time to review your toy collection from time to time, instead of always going online and to toy stores to check what’s new there.  Happy toys collecting!

Learn to let live if you can’t get certain toys - Yes, none of them are really worth overpaying and fighting for.  In our lifetime, we don’t actually own anything.  Physical possessions are ours for as long as we live.  We are merely temporary keepers of things until they pass from us through selling, giving or when we finally leave the mortal world.  So focus more on the enjoyment of the hobby rather than on the frustrations of not being to get hold of certain toys.  Like a wise person once said about looking at a piece of clean white paper with a tiny dot on it: Do you focus on the cleanliness and whiteness of the paper, or get distracted by that tiny irritating dot on it?  We can choose our views.  Happy toy collecting! 

Beware that over collecting toys can wreck relationships - Yes, this is true when the toy collecting hobby becomes too overwhelming for other people living with you.  Remember that one person’s treasure isn’t necessary the same for another person who doesn’t share that same passion with you.  To the non-toy collectors, these toy things are not just a waste of money but a waste of precious home space as well. 

Most of us live with somebody who are not toy collectors, hence we tend to get nagged at for bringing back more and more ‘junk’ nearly every time we come home.  It sort of spoils the good mood we have from the so-called ’successful’ toy hunting trip that day.  Then you would think that having a supportive spouse, partner or family members who share your toy hobby is a blessing.  Well it isn’t.  One person in the household being ‘poisoned’ is bad enough, not to mention more members being in the same boat as well! 

Hence overall, I still think that having non-toy collectors in the house nagging at us periodically or frequently, is a kind of check and balance method to ensure that we don’t go overboard in our toy collecting too easily or rapidly.  Hobbies are best done in moderation.  Being sensitive to the feelings of other people you share your abode with is also crucial, especially if you want your toy collecting hobby to always remind you happy things in life!

The above is my only display cabinet for my toys and it’s being occupied by My Little Pony collection.  All the other toys I own are stored in boxes (that are packed away in cupboards or stacked on the floor somewhere in my home). 

For toy collectors who own their homes, their options for better display and storage of their collections are more opened.  Seeing is believing.  Let the photos that you’re about to view in the following links speak the thousands of words I want to share with everyone! 

As I don’t own my very own home yet, these dreams are still quite some time away for me!  Nevertheless, enjoy viewing the photos, and I hope that you get inspired by them!

HQ of Little Plastic Man - Adrian also shared a fabulous a link on his blog to another toy collector’s Star Wars collection at home!

Alex’ Toy Haven -  For Alex, the theme of his entire home is centred on his massive toys collection!

Having read numerous articles on how to clear away clutter effectively from our homes and how to keep our homes as clutter free as possible, I decided that since I can’t stop myself from buying more new toys, the least I can do is to clear out some near equivalent volume of unwanted items each time I bring something new into my home!  In short I call it - One in one out!

My thrown out items do not have to be toys, but anything that is unwanted, unused and already broken etc.  On days that I do not buy any new toys, I take a plastic bag (the standard sized one from the supermarket) and gather a bagful of clutter items from around the house to dispose.  Sometimes I’m unsure of whether to really throw out those bags that I’ve packed.  Perhaps I was too hasty in my quick snap decision making just to fulfill my daily clutter clearing quota that I had set for myself.  And so quite a number of packed bags have been sitting on my balcony floor since the beginning of this month!

Then today when I looked at those tied up plastic bags, I could not recall what items went into them over the past week and a half.  I certainly didn’t miss the absence of those unremembered contents around the house and besides, I have new things waiting to come in soon (via the mail).  So some of the current clutter have to inevitably give way to the ‘newcomers’.  And hence I threw out all the nearly 10 bags of clutter today! 

It felt so good that they are all gone from my balcony at last!  It was certainly very unsightly to look at them there each day.  I highly recommend the above home organsing solution to anyone who is in a similar predicament like me!  Happy clutter clearing!

Times flies past very quickly and we’re near the end of quarter 3 for 2010!  Within September itself, we’re reaching mid-month soon.  The stream of latest toy news have slowed down for now, since most of us are already aware of the upcoming toys that are scheduled for retail release in the rest of the year.

Due to the ongoing sales are various local departmental stores, many toy collectors find themselves busy buying their wanted toys at discounted prices. Some of them remarked that they have become quite broke for the rest of the month!  For me I did buy some toys lately, and I barely have a proper storage space for my latest purchases.

I better use the long weekend to speed my clutter clearing and re-organise my storage space all over again to accommodate the additional toys to my collection.  If not, I’ll barely have enough floor space in my room to walk about, LOL!  How about you?  Have you also taken advantage of the sales at departmental stores to increase your toy collections?

Here’s a stack of The New Paper (TNP) 2010 dollar notes up for sale.  I’m doing this on behalf of a friend.  There are TNP$10,900 in this stack and I’ve placed them for sale at my toy lockers no. 28E & 28F at Toy Outpost (Plaza Singapura, 7th floor).  Price is SGD 18.00 for the whole stack.  If you’re taking part, good luck in your TNP auction bidding!

While taking a break from sourcing for the latest toys information online, I spent the entire evening clearing out my emails.  Incidentally, a great chunk of emails to clear consisted of Facebook related requests, invitations, notifications etc. from friends. 

Then when I finally logged into Facebook, the nightmare of seeing a long list of overdue messages really hit me in the face!  That’s when I realise how ‘deeply hooked’ many of my friends (who are on Facebook) are onto the appeal of the various Facebook games like Fishville, Farmville, Zoo World, Restaurant City, Warstorm and Castle Age, just to name some!

Many many months ago, and possible more than a year ago, I explored a few of these games but didn’t get started very far on them.  After visiting the online ‘accomplishments’ of my Facebook friends in their frenzy over such games, I finally bothered to make some attempt to furnish up and build up my chosen games.  I have to admit that these games are pretty addictive, such that overplaying them can make you forget the time, LOL!

If you play Facebook games like Fishville, Farmville and Zoo World (which are the only 3 games that I wish to focus on) you will realise that the emotions behind playing them are rather similar to those of toy collecting.  They largely involve the thrill of the hunt (especially for rare and limited items); fruit of your labour, joys and pride of amassing a sizeable collection of items, gathering experience points and reaching certain levels to feel proud before your friends etc. 

Well at least the virtual items we collect online don’t take up physical space and clutter up our homes, though the games surely used up a lot of time to acquire and achieve to certain levels.  So how about you? Do you play such Facebook games too?  If you’re quite ‘deeply hooked’ into them, can you also draw some parallels with your emotions behind toy collecting?  Do feel free to share your comments here!

Our little island nation of Singapore is proud and extremely honoured to be the host of the inaugural Youth Olympic Games (YOG) 2010!  The symbolic Youth Olympic Flame arrived in Singapore early this month and its torchbearers carried and escorted it around many parts of Singapore throughout this week (in both rain and shine).  The highly anticipated grand opening ceremony will take place this evening at our world’s largest floating platform stage by the Marina Bay. 

These are our beloved mascots for the YOG.  Quoted from the YOG website:

“Lyo is short for ‘Lion of the Youth Olympics’.  A sports lover, he is fun-loving and hopes to inspire young people to keep fit and enjoy sports for life.  He symbolises the boundless energy of youths, their determination to live life to the fullest, and their zeal to strive for excellence.”

“Merly got her name from ‘mer’ (meaning the sea) and ‘l y’ stand for ‘liveliness’ and ‘youthfulness’.  A passionate advocate of environment protection, Merly believes that everyone has  role to play in working towards a sustainable future.  She also wants to encourage young people to play an active role in their communities and promote respect for one another.”

Incidentally, Lyo and Merly are also made into plush toys and keychains etc, that are available for sale at the YOG booths.  Together, Lyo and Merly will also be with the athletes in “blazing the trail” from 14-26 August 2010 as they inspire the young athletes and help them persevere towards their goals and strive for Olympic Gold!

Our local tv channels will offer some coverage of the various YOG sports in the coming 2 weeks.  If you subscribe to local cable sports channels (e.g. Starhub), then you’ll get up to 4 channels that are specially dedicated to YOG sports coverage throughout the day and late into the night.  Or if you prefer, the tickets to the venues of some sports are still available for sale online and at the respective sports venues.

Have a fantastic time during the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games!

Well since my laptop is awaiting the replacement parts which need to be specially ordered, I end up using my older laptop whose internet speed capacity seems almost like “crawling”.  This makes online research for toy news, and even blogging and posting photos a torture for me.  As a result, I cut down my online hours and decided to do one of my other pastimes - clearing piles of accumulated paper clutter from my room!

In less than half an hour, I cleared out one plastic bag full of useless paper materials for the recycling bin.  For the paper clutter that I retained, most are actually the backcards and flattened boxes of my latest toy purchases, but I hadn’t stored them away with the rest of my toy packaging collection yet.  It’s a bit troublesome to access those storage areas in the remote and hard to reach parts of my cupboards, so I procrastinated for the past several weeks.  In the meantime, new toys keep streaming in, together with their packaging, argh!

I usually dislike stacking heaps of things on the floor as it is very unsightly, but my cupboards are full and my toy cullings are not speedy enough to match my toys inputs.  Such is the peril of being in a hobby to do with compulsive and addictive hoarding habits, like toys collecting.  At the end of the day, I sometimes wonder if there are truly other effective ways of appreciating toys without owning them and storing them at home?  I may want to look into my nephew’s suggestion of ‘collecting toys’ by ticking their sightings at the stores on a check list and be done with it!