Mood:

Now Playing: "I Walk The Line" - a really good DVD rental.
Of course, now that I'm using Word to type the entries, Tripod hasn't misplaced so much as a semicolon. Oh, well. This way I can type throughout the day, and think a bit more about what I'm trying to say, possibly edit out the excess verbiage I'm known for. Plus, Word - even our ancient but legal 2003 version - has a spell checker I don't have to download and install separately.
Still pluggin' away at the pattern image catalog. Stripped 40 files today, but they were sooo easy. Next to nothing to do. While we were at the library yesterday, I verified that I could use their laser printers to print ‘em out for 15c a page. Still cheaper than the approximately 25c a page ya get out of most inkjet cartridges. Since I have an appointment there with two young ladies on Tuesday - they're inheriting my Japanese Sailor Moon manga - I'll take the back-up CD I've already burned and see if their printers do a better job on the images. I'm willing to bet that they will ! The Brother is doing a bang-up job, much better than the Lexmark would have done with the same source material, but shelling out $5.25 for the pages I have ready now is much cheaper than buying another $25. inkjet.
The shelf I had Elphie and Fiyero sitting on - along with the Witch of the West and Ogre Baby Girl toys from the ‘Madame Alexander Wizard of Oz' and Shrek 3 Happy Meal promotions - fell, and dumped everyone to the floor, about four feet below. On top of My Size Barbies Casey and Gracie and Baby Chrissy. Yikes. Luckily no one was permanently damaged, but I'm not putting that shelf back up there. Instead, I'm going to finally buy that white 1968 Barbie case I've been wanting. Beloved Hubby told me to go ahead and order it when I came back from the focus group Monday, but I dawdled, mostly because I wasn't sure where I'd hang the case. Walls in the Studio are getting pretty full !
But it'd be perfect in that non-shelf space ! I had the pink version of that case - here's a link if you'd like to see one -> http://www.dolls4play.com/barbielistphotos/mc238.jpg - but I prefer the white version instead. That is one rather violent shade of pink ! Mine was open most of the time, sometimes because it was an apartment, but mostly because I hated that color. I didn't hate pink, just preferred more cotton-candy shades of it. I didn't hate what came to be called ‘Barbie pink' until I had to wear sunglasses to check out that section of Toys R Us back in the day. Odd, how I now think of those times as the glory days. I did think of getting the pink one, as a sort of ‘childhood repurchase', but even the child me would have wanted the white one if given a choice.
They're not any more or less expensive than the pink or blue ones, but I only see the white version once or twice a month. It's otherwise identical to the pink case, just the vinyl is white and the detail coloring is different, and in prettier shades. So I'm gonna hunt one down and cherish it. By hanging it up in the Studio ! Maybe part of it is a poem to my ‘new, improved' childhood !
I sure won't hang up clothes in it, or the Midge and Barbie ones. Could never get more than three or four hangers on that bar in there anyway. They never stayed up there for long, either. I was either a rough-and-tumble kid, or the little coat hangers were just eternal optimism meeting uncaring gravity head-on.
My Barbies' clothes (along with Ken's and the Skippers') all fit in there back in '75. I simply didn't use hangers. There they were, either neatly laid out or hurriedly tossed in, either way soon becoming a shifting wad in the closet section, easy to dump out when setting up apartments at Lisa or Angie's house. While we didn't yet understand irony, it was kind of funny to us that big props - houses, cars, etc - didn't start appearing until shortly before we were ready to move out of Barbie and into teenhood.
But everyone had a licensed vinyl case ! Closet section became a sofa, when the ‘Accessories' box got turned so the blank part faced out. Sometimes it was covered with a fabric scrap, for that ‘comfy home' look. It'd be removed completely for seating until the cardboard slot for it started to sag. The doll section was the door, or a phone booth. Artwork clipped from magazines or included with bubblegum cards usually decorated the blank spaces. Since the case fastened at the top, when it was down, the lid became the floor, usually festooned with a carpet scrap or a crocheted doily for an area rug. I stupidly put an ugly sticker from a pack of CB Radio trading cards on my ‘floor', and to my horror, it wouldn't peel off ! I picked at it until most of it came up, but that spot was sticky from that moment on.
Not a lot of Mattel furniture in the ‘hood, either. Spray-paint and hair spray can lids in various colors made available modular furniture. One of Lisa's more...unique dolls preferred a seat on a tomato-shaped pincushion. Since Lisa's mom hated having all the pins pushed in, Lisa's unfortunate doll was hopefully ‘into' that sort of thing. Angie had a double ‘sleep and keep' case that I sort of envied, I just hated that our dolls couldn't handle or touch the painted-on props. And those beds did not look comfy until we found some fabric scraps. I have a 90s version of the ‘Sleep and Keep', but I don't consider it a case. It's Molly's bedroom ! It actually does sort of resemble the one shown in a few episodes of Sailor Moon...
It's sort of funny how a fallen shelf put me into contact with so many memories...and clarified what I wanted. Hmm. Maybe Elphie and Fiyero pushed it ?