Yankee Candle Halloween Preview

Yesterday Yankee Candle had a special one-day preview of their upcoming Halloween 2014 collection, and we dropped in to get a look. Thanks to PerkyJewels on Twitter for the tip-off!

Spirit Halloween Store Opening Soon

Took a little stroll through the neighborhood this morning, and what should we find?

Come September, tune in to Tobyblog for further details!

A Visit To The Toy Store

The great thing about being a dad to small kids is that you always have a built-in excuse to be in the toy aisle. And if you have your kids with you then nobody looks twice at you as you gawk at all the amazing stuff on the store shelves these days. We are living in a golden age for toys and board games. Sure, there were a lot of really cool toys that I miss from the seventies and eighties that I wish my kids had a chance to experience, but today’s market offers a certain quality and vast variety of toys and other amusements that the old days could never touch.

Halloween Has Arrived at At Home

Garden Ridge recently declared bankruptcy, and are now being reincorporated as At Home. But true to form, the seasons still come early there and stay late.

My dear wife noticed yesterday that one of the nearby stores had been refurbished, so we decided to drop in and check it out. I of course had high hopes for what to expect, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Dropping Quarters

There is a little independent retro gaming store in Plano that is the closest thing to a real arcade that I’ve ever experienced with the kids. There are still a lot of places you could call “arcades”, mostly attached to chain family restaurants like Chuck-E-Cheese or entertainment complexes like Fun Zone or Amazing Jakes. But the key differentiator for me is that the machines take real quarters, preferably only one per play. I always hated changing tokens, and to me the idea of plopping tokens into a machine screws with the mythology somehow.