Well that may be an understatement! You see, I live in Clarkston, Michigan in the USA. You may be seeing on the news in your part of the world the breaking story of the latest school shooting in the US. My house is just 13 miles from the Oxford High School were the shooting happened. We have friends who have family attending this school. My 21 year old daughter ran track while in high school and she attended track meets at this school. This is just too close to home. There is a cloud of shock and depression hanging over the surrounding communities. Today, there was a list of at least 20 ..read more

 Well, Mattel has done it again! Surprised us with a new doll line. One would have hoped that we would have heard about it from Mattel, but they dropped the ball on announcing it to us as online sleuths found out about it and reported the dolls on their sites. They very quickly became available on Amazon for pre-order if you were lucky enough to grab them and eBay opportunist are already offering them at inflated prices. The line is called Barbie Signature Looks. This new series has debuted with 6 brand new dolls. All new face sculpts, MTM articulation and in Original, Tall, Petite and Cu ..read more

 I don't usually do box openings, but I was so excited for the debut of the new line of Barbie Style dolls, that I wanted to do a full review of my impression of the first in the line of these dolls. I have long been a fan of the Instagram account @BarbieStyle and was one of the followers who clamored for Mattel to grace our collections with the beautiful dolls we saw on those pages. I loved the sophistication of the look of the dolls on the Instagram account and wanted my dolls to at least have the very well made clothes you saw on the dolls that graced those pages! I could not help but ..read more

 OK, we made it through 2020 -- sort of! The virus is still with us though and, unfortunately, probably here to stay. I have personally been touched with it in my family. I have lost friends to the disease. We are going to have to learn to live with it. It probably means we will need to continue to take precautions like wearing masks, staying home sometimes, keeping a social distance when appropriate. The vaccine in the US at least seems to be rolling out very slowly. I am hoping that the new administration will be more proactive in getting it under control. Heck, anything they do wi ..read more

 So I have been in a creative mood lately. One of the things I realized I needed to do was to get my office area organized. It occupies a wall in my living room and there was never any space for anything. My computer desk always had piles of papers on it and it only had one drawer, so it was hard to achieve any sort of organization. I decided I wanted to get a hutch for the desk. I priced them out and they are pretty expensive and I really couldn't find one that fit my desk. So I decided I wanted to try and build something. I wanted it to be sturdy and something that would not fall apart ..read more

 At the urging of a friend on Instagram (Dollboy92) I decided to dig out my daughters' old My Scene dolls. I am sure many of you remember them. They were brought into the Mattel line up to compete with the Bratz dolls in 2002 and were discontinued in 2014. I will be honest, and I don't want to irritate any Bratz fans, but I did steer my daughters away from Bratz in favor of the the My Scene dolls. So going through my doll stash, I discovered that we had 21 of the My Scene gal dolls in a box. We do have some of the boys as well, but their bodies were commandeered for use on some of our old ..read more

Thanks to posts from Monster Crafts and Jayes Doll Space, I have been inspired to begin blogging again. I can't believe it has been a little over a year since I have posted. While I haven't been actively blogging, I have been actively adding to my doll collection. Plus I have done quite a few reroots to create new characters. And the doll stories have been writing themselves in my head, but I now need to get the down on paper, get the sets built and take the photos to tell the stories.  As far as life goes, I have been maintaining my weight loss, but I am now trying to los ..read more