Toy Report: Final Faction’s Churro and Air Assault accessory pack

Yes, I know this site and the project that spawned it is supposed to be about having less junk than more but here me out. I’ve had a terrible few weeks. I’m not even going into all of it because I seem to be coming out the other end of a bad time, I’m hopefully almost done with doctors and tests after tomorrow (I wonder if I should call this “doctor visit season”?), and I’m ready to get back to work. The last two weeks have been videos of someone else cleaning. Trying to snag the photos for this was a larger chore than it should have been. Point is I’m not having a good time and something needs to make me happy. This was still cheaper than a “pity Transformer”, something I had my eye on for a while waiting to come out, and it doesn’t take up a lot of space. It’s not something I’m going to do a lot of and it’s time for projects that may lead to more removal so I’m giving myself a pass on this.

If that’s not enough: chiwawa in a flying mech suit with guns. Argument over.

Final Faction is kind of a throwback to 1980s action figures like G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. It’s exclusive to Dollar Tree, a former dollar store that just went $1.25 on my last trip out there earlier this week because (or so I heard) some influential and greedy boardroom member doesn’t understand what a dollar store is for, especially as the economy gets worse with the idiots in charge of said economy. Then again I’m not sure how an extra quarter is going to boost their revenue. There are two episodes of a CG cartoon that shows either this is meant as a humorous homage or someone doesn’t know how the 1980s worked as it’s kind of goofy. I first heard about the line from an episode of the YouTube channel Retroblasting (here’s the video if you want to know more about the line) and it sounded neat but not something I was interested in. Then I saw the first episode of the promo cartoon.

Still not interested in most of the line so I probably won’t get anything else from this series but one thing stood out immediately: chiwawa in a mech suit that’s also a dog that it uses to fight alien invaders. I’m too much of a geek to say no to that, especially given what I’ve been through as of late. Sadly fans of this idea would have to wait until wave 2, which just recently came out around here. (Connecticut is notoriously slow for getting new toys, which really used to annoy me when I could collect Transformers.) So for under three bucks I have this silly thing and the accessories seen in the episode. I’ll explain that as we move into the review.

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Let’s Watch Someone Declutter Their Garage

Well, I was right about this week being crazy. It didn’t help that Saturday had blah weather around here and that killed what little motivation I had to do something this week. On the plus side I get to talk about something I don’t have to declutter…because our garage was already organized before this site and my declutter project proper even got started.

I don’t understand why people use their garage as a storage shed. Maybe it’s because we have storage space, but I’ve seen a garage not usable as a garage on multiple home improvement shows because there are boxes and totes of stuff taking it over. And of course there’s the old cliché of the wife yelling at the husband to finally clean out the garage, but the task being so monumental that he keeps finding excuses not to. So I wanted to find a video of a man cleaning out his garage. I wasn’t looking for anything that required a big financial expense or was setting it up as anything other than a garage and maybe a place to work on the car, the other purpose of a garage.

And so I found this video by YouTube channel GardenFork. Here he gives tips for decluttering your garage without really making anything TV worthy out of the final product. The thing about doing YouTube videos from home is the incentive to make it look like a good backdrop or set to film on and look professional. This is just a simple organizing and clutter removal operation, which is what I wanted. Despite turning my studio into something that looks good on camera as part of my projects, DIY on the cheap and easy decluttering to make the space functional for the intended purpose is currently the name of the game around here.

Let’s Watch Someone Declutter Their “Croffice”

Thanks to insomnia I didn’t have the drive to do any cleaning this week as I only have one day a week to declutter and organize. That’s part of the reason this is taking so long, but not the only one. With the next two weeks looking to be pretty hectic with doctor appointments Saturdays may actually be a quiet time while I’m still decluttering. It depends on the stuff I do for the other site and other things I need to be doing for myself. If I can finally get my sleep cycle under control I just might be able to put my living back together, if that sentence made any sense. If not, blame it on going to bed around 2AM and waking up at 12:30 PM.

However, I did want to give you readers something to look into. Part of posting my decluttering projects or doing a deep review to see if I want to keep this or that is putting thoughts in your head about your own journey. I know “minimalist” is the craze in decluttering but that may be too far for me, feeling sometimes like the opposite of “hoarder”. I am a collector, but getting myself to enjoy my collections by not having them too big or filled with stuff I’m not interested is part of the journey.

So is there the main focus of decluttering has been, my personal living space. This includes the room I’ve been trying to turn into a dedicated studio for my art and video projects. Technically it is but it’s still a mess, so maybe I can get some inspiration from the following video. From the YouTube channel ClutterBug comes this story from 2021, part of the lockdown years. The host is using technology we once thought would exist in science fiction to talk to a woman named Michelle through videophone. Michelle has a room similar to mine. Where I do article writing, comics and other art work, and the occasional video she wants to make a dedicated craft room/office combo, her “croffice”. However her place is around the same mess I was when I started, but thanks to the host and more time that I have to dedicate she finally gets to vacuum her floor. That will make more sense when you see the video.

Organizing The Hat Rack

Sorry, the window was brighter than I thought.

I like wearing hats when I go out. I just liked collecting a few as a kid and I’ve picked up a few more since, but I like wearing hats more as an adult than I did as a kid. I didn’t hate wearing them, I’m just more into wearing them when I’m out now. To keep them organized my mom opted not to just use a hat rack but picked up a pot and pan rack (I think that’s what that is) thinking it could hold more hats. It would if the hats weren’t falling all over each other. It’s kind of a mess and kind of a pain to get one hat without a bunch of them falling behind the couch, plus it doesn’t look very nice. This week’s project was to try to fix that a bit and find a different way to have the hats on there.

I had tested one way to get the hats on there and it seemed to be holding. So it was just a matter of doing it for all the hats…or at least the hats I could. By the time I was done, I also had a couple of donations and eliminations do I decluttered a bit as well. That’s a nice bonus.