The Target, Kmart Super Center, and Albertsons Score

On New Year's Eve, Mom's birthday, at Pacific View Mall in Ventura, we turned toward Target after leaving Calendar Club, where Mom had been looking at page-a-day calendars, looking for a new one since Wonderword wasn't published as one for the new year.

I wanted Target because this wasn't the one in Valencia, nor the one in Golden Valley that I still haven't been to to see what Matchbox cars they have there. This was also a Target fitted to the mall, with two levels, with us entering the second level which had electronics and the toy aisles.

I fairly breezed to the toy aisles, finding where the Matchbox cars were, and a lot of what I already had. I didn't need the desert vehicles, I didn't need an ambulance, I didn't need a police car, because the former was a different from what I wanted and the latter two are fairly typical of any city. But I did find a green Matchbox flatbed dump truck, which is what I count as a working vehicle because it can be driven distances, unlike a tractor or a backhoe, as I mentioned in yesterday's entry. Plus, the orange flatbed lifts up to its highest angle toward the back. I still marvel at that only being $1.09.

Yesterday, on the way back to Pacific View Mall for Mom to pick up a calendar she wanted at Calendar Club, we stopped at Kmart Super Center because Mom wanted to try the Pepsi Icee that Kmarts seem to have. By now, you can tell what I was thinking when we parked in that Kmart lot.

I went to the toy aisles, and saw a "Camping Adventure" five-pack that had a camper transport vehicle, but not enough true working vehicles. I couldn't get used to them. At the same time I found that, I also found a gray "Quick Steam Cleaners" van, with the slogan, "Call the Professionals First!" I could imagine the equipment in the back of this van, and so it was mine.

There was also a clearance section in one toy aisle with bins you could dig through for toys at 50% off. There were a few Tron: Legacy figures, and I remembered going to Big Lots the day before and seeing many of them, turning one to the back and finding that a figure had apparently been made of Castor, Michael Sheen's delightfully charismatic club owner and one of my favorite characters in all of movie history. Researching online, I learned that either the figure was rare or had never been made. My theory is that the first wave of Tron: Legacy toys came out before the movie's release, and then when it didn't do as well as Disney hoped, there were no more toys made, with Castor being the second wave if the movie had been more successful according to Disney's standards, which were understandable with an estimated $170 million dollar budget, and a $172 million dollar gross in the United States, though it did make $400 million worldwide. But I would have loved to have that Castor figure, though I guess I'll settle for the film strip bookmark I have with Castor on it from a seller that used to reside on Etsy, but now sells her bookmarks on Artfire. I use that bookmark now for all the Las Vegas books that I'm reading one after the other in anticipation of always-hedonistic days ahead.

Even knowing about the fate of the Castor figure, I still looked through what Kmart had and found nothing of Castor. In one of the bins, though, I found a diecast model of the Recognizer, those flying upside-down wide U-shaped machines that hunt and capture rogue programs in Tron City. The yellow tag on the packaging said "Reduced - $2.00." I got it for $1 (50% off, remember), and with the Matchbox steam cleaning service van, the total was $2 and minor change. Can't beat that for a collection. I'm thinking of keeping the Recognizer in front of me when I'm researching and writing because though the machine is used for malevolent purposes, I'm hunting for what I want to profile in my next book and just like the Recognizer brings the rogue programs on board, I'm bringing all that I learned into my mind and into notes, swirling it around, looking for the combination that works for me. I've got the skeleton of the book down, but now need to make a proper outline to figure out the path for each chapter. To me, the Recognizer is a reminder of tenacity, of unceasingly working to get what you want. I can't do "unceasingly," since I need some time for other things, my working vehicles collection notwithstanding, but I embrace the same spirit for better purposes.

The end of our hours of errands brought us to Albertsons after dinner at nearby Chronic Taco, where I had the breakfast quesadilla with chorizo that I had been craving for a week and a half after having it for the first time two weeks prior. They serve it all day and it's worth it at any hour of the day. At Albertsons, since this wasn't the usual Albertsons we go to, I went right to the toy aisle and found resounding success. At the other Albertsons, there was a five-pack of vehicles belonging to a car repair shop, including a white tow truck, and two regular trucks that I didn't want. The set was $7 and change, and I didn't want to pay for two vehicles I didn't want. That same day, before this Albertsons, Mom said I could buy the pack and donate the two trucks to Goodwill. Leave it to mothers to instantly find the logic that didn't seem so obvious at the time, particularly since I donate a lot of books, some that I had just bought but had read them and determined that they wouldn't be part of my permanent collection. In this Albertsons toy aisle, I found a "Service Center No. 12" pack with a black tow truck with a blue hook, far cooler than that white tow truck I thought I wanted so badly.

There's also a tan "Service Center" truck with a hitch in the back, a blue "30 Minutes or Less Tune Up Service" truck, a green "EcoFuel Intl." tank truck with a black tank, and a nacho cheese-yellow "JC Body & Paint" van saying, "We take any make or model" under the logo.

None of these five vehicles will go to Goodwill. I paid $7 and change and got exactly what I wanted and more. I'm deeply satisfied with every single vehicle I have, and can admire them, play with them, and enjoy them, thinking no further of expanding my collection until we move, and that includes big rigs and Hess trucks that I had when I was little that I want to have again. If there happens to be another working vehicle I find before we move that I really want, of course I'll snap it up, but I don't have that electric desire for any other working vehicle like I did for the tow truck.

I love that what I did as a kid never faded, just waited patiently in the background. To think it all started again with that flour truck I bought at Smith's in Henderson.

Day 6 of a Four-Week Pleasure Cruise

We four are standing on a section of sidewalk overlooking part of Ventura Harbor, in front of a large fishing boat that's firmly anchored, yet slowly drifts to the dock and away from it repeatedly. I've got a butter pecan ice cream malt, and Meridith's got a cotton candy/bubble gum ice cream malt (which turns purple, her favorite color, when both flavors are combined), both from Coastal Cone nearby. We're right near the Fisherman's Memorial, which faces the parking lot that's adjacent to Andria's Seafood Restaurant, which was prohibitively expensive for us this time. It's the afternoon of New Year's Eve, also Mom's birthday. Being at Ventura Harbor Village used to feel vivid, exciting in parts, with much to look at in all the shops. It doesn't anymore.

Before this point, we went to Pacific View Mall, which Mom wanted to go to as a farewell before we finally left the Santa Clarita Valley for good (It'll happen soon enough, I hope), and she wanted to see what calendars the Calendar Club store had. I like that mall because most importantly, it's not Valencia Town Center, where you can walk around but feel throughout that you can't touch much, unlike Galleria at Sunset in Henderson where you can go anywhere in that mall and feel like it's yours to explore. Pacific View Mall actually feels like a mall, not just a collection of stores separated by escalators. There's Sears, Macy's, JCPenney and Target as anchors. The second floor is wall-to-wall carpeting. It's not a mall for me to embrace because outside of the Santa Clarita Valley, I always feel like a tourist wherever we go. California has that gift, good or bad.

At Target, I found a Matchbox flatbed dump truck, which I snapped up for my working vehicles collection. That's as far as I go with construction vehicles. Bulldozers, mixers, backhoes and others do a lot of work, but generally in one place. A dump truck has to get from one place to another. You can't drive a backhoe down the 405.

After that was Super Panda Buffet at the corner of the mall property. We've been to it before, and Mom decided to go there because Andria's was far too expensive and at least here, the price for all four for us was a lot more than what we could have gotten at Andria's for the same price. Plus, we could all find something we liked there, and we did, save for the hard-boiled egg I had at the end which was in the fridge in its shell for too long, with a gray color around it.

Back at that section of the harbor, after air hockey with Meridith, two games of Galaga, and two games of Cruis'n USA (I wish it had been Cruis'n Exotica, like at the roller skating rink in Ventura the year before last, because I liked rolling under that landing 747 at that Hong Kong airport), I thought about the entire day, had liked what we did, but it didn't feel like it used to. And I realized what was missing.

The many times before that we were at Ventura Harbor Village, there wasn't as much hope as there is now in moving out of Southern California. So being there, being somewhere completely different from where we exist ("Live" is a word that should be used when you're happy with where you are), we threw ourselves into the experience, which wasn't hard. This time, the pleasure was muted, because we know better things are coming in our lives.

Even so, it's places like Ventura Harbor Village that saved me from feeling insane from where I exist. It's true that in order to do anything interesting in the Santa Clarita Valley, you have to leave. Thank goodness for those options.

Three More Working Vehicles

I thought I'd wait until we were residents of Henderson to expand my toy working vehicles collection. I was wrong.

Target was the first errand for Dad, Meridith and I, with Sprouts and Pavilions afterward, and we were there because Dad needed Imodium A-D or something like it. "Something like it" won out because it was cheaper than the brand.

We were at the register, Dad paid, and as he was leaving, I realized that I forgot to look at the Matchbox cars in the toy aisles. Meridith called Dad to let him know where we were and that we'd be at the car in a few minutes, and off I went, fairly rushing, fueled by my enthusiasm for my collection.

The tow truck still wasn't being sold separately from the car repair service set, but I first became giddy from finding a "Dallas Fort Worth Airport" hazmat truck. Then a green garbage truck with a sun and a green leaf in a white rectangle in the middle on each side, the stem of the green leaf saying "Live better in a clean world!", with "Go Green" under the leaf and word stem.

The back of the garbage truck is slightly open, and you press it down, and it comes back up to its original place. It's meant to be the crusher that comes down to make room for more garbage.

The final working vehicle I found was a water truck, labeled "Aqua King" on the underside. The inside of the truck is full of what's supposed to look like greenish bottles, their tops sticking out like you see on the road. This is one of my favorites.

I love how relatively cheap my hobby is, with these vehicles being $1.07 each. For now, at least, I don't go searching often for mine, and my hobby started by happening to find that five-pack of city vehicles, including the ice cream truck and moving truck, at the same Target. I was just browsing aimlessly.

I still want that tow truck, but now that I've searched on eBay, probably not the one I've been eyeing in that five-pack. There's so many other Matchbox types, including a "GMC Wrecker" released this year, another from 1990, and still another from 2000. I think I've found something to do while working on my writing projects.

Got to Be the Only Uptick in That Aisle

Yesterday, the end of a long list of errands (post office, Sprouts, Walmart, made long by the time spent at the latter) led us to Albertsons to pick up what apparently is the only decent bread in this valley. It's the only one Mom has found that is tolerable, and we hope to find many good kinds in Henderson and not just one.

Albertsons is also the only store I know of in this valley that sells individual Matchbox cars. Target sells only five-packs, one of which I picked up and considerably expanded my collection of working vehicles. I haven't checked Toys"R"Us because the location here has always felt like the Wal-Mart of toy stores, just where you go to pick up obligatory birthday gifts for someone's kid.

At this Albertsons, in recent weeks, I've bought a forklift, a "concrete specialists" truck, and an "MH Authentic Austin Performance Parts" vehicle, which looks like a close cousin of a hearse. I figure that in supermarkets, at Walmart, at Target, heck, at anywhere that caters to customers, they keep tabs on what sells. Now, whether my purchases of individual working vehicles at Albertsons made such a difference, I don't know, but last night, I went to that empty toy aisle as always (It doesn't seem like anyone buys anything from there), flipped through the individual cars, noted what I already had, and then found in the back a water tanker truck, "Construction Water Supply Delivery." Exactly what I hoped to find just as a working vehicle, and it gives me hope that maybe somewhere in Vegas or in Henderson, the tow truck I want is sold individually, because I surely won't find it here.

The water tanker truck brings me to 11 working vehicles so far, and it'll only keep growing. I was always fascinated by garbage trucks when I was a kid, and I think I like these vehicles because they've got a purpose besides transport. They're not just showing off. They're a part of something. Once I have more room in our new place (even though it's actually smaller square footage than this place, but my DVDs are all in two binders and I'll be moving with less books), I'm thinking of adding big rigs.

The Flour Truck of Henderson

In Casselberry, in the late '80s, my four-, five-, six-year-old self loved plunging his hands into a rectangular plastic wastebasket filled with toy figurines and cars. Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Camaros, a Lamborghini, and a car wash set and a racetrack that hooked up on one end of a table, and letting the car go at the top, hoping it would build speed fast enough to race through the loop-the-loop on the other end. All with so much to love, though in hindsight, no clue why.

I guess it was the young American boy thing to do, probably the same reason I had a collection of baseball cards in a binder, though I liked basketball much more. I also read Motor Trend when I was eight and nine, but I don't think I was looking at and admiring specs and engines. Maybe just the cars themselves, the shapes, the style.

On the second-to-most-recent trip to Las Vegas, I returned to that little boy form, in a different aspect. We spent a lot of time in Henderson, deciding even then if that's where we wanted to live, exploring the area, seeing what fit and what didn't. We stopped at a Smith's supermarket, and I walked around in awe because it felt like a neighborhood supermarket should. It felt like people cared about what they bought, whereas at a Ralphs or Vons here, people just grab what they need on an errand, throw it into the cart, zoom right into the checkout lane, pay for it, and zoom right out. At that Smith's, it felt like people took their time to shop, to buy what they truly wanted, what would fulfill them.

It was also a supermarket of unusual sights, namely a circular display outside one aisle filled with toy cars and trucks. Toy aisles at Ralphs and Vons are perfunctory and brief, filled with cheap crap to buy only when you're heading to a birthday party that you really don't want to go to, and you have to bring something.

Here were cars, VW Beetles, school buses. I looked at all of them, picked a few up, not for nostalgia's sake, but out of curiosity, because I still have that part of me. I discovered that my taste for cars had been replaced by working vehicles: School buses, ice cream trucks, street cleaners, daycare transports, moving vans and trucks, anything with a daily purpose.

At that display, I found a flour truck, dark brown at the front, lighter brown in the back, with doors that open on each side, and light peach-colored bags of flour that are highest at the top, and seem to have tumbled toward the bottom. On the left and right side of where the bags of flour are held, the logo of the "Diamond Flour Co." is stamped, and each side says, "Good Quality & Good Service." It was probably about six or seven dollars and I bought it. I wanted it as a reminder of a good place, and to start a collection of working vehicles.

That collection grew by five at Target in Valencia on Friday night. While Mom and Meridith looked at styluses for the Nintendo DS (since we'll need some new ones soon), I found a Curious George doll that reminded me of kindergarten at Sterling Park Elementary in Casselberry, and Mrs. Moffat let each student take home the Curious George doll for one night and bring it back the next day. At the end of the year, one of us got to take it home for good, and it wasn't me. It sure wasn't as big as the one that I picked up. I hope there is still something like that in some kindergarten classes.

After I showed it to Mom and Meridith, I put it back and then stopped at the Matchbox aisle to see if there were any airplanes, namely commercial airliners. Nothing with real-life airline logos on them since that's too specialized and it's what hobby shops and stores such as Puzzle Zoo are for, and especially "The Airplane Shop" near McCarran International in Las Vegas, which I'm jonesing to visit the next time I'm there.

Looking more closely at the packs of cars available, I spotted a five-pack with a street cleaning vehicle ("City Cleaner"), a moving truck ("Move-It"), a blue-and-green polka-dotted ice cream truck ("Polka Dot Ice Cream Co."), a daycare bus ("Child Care Learning Center"), and a red van for roadside service ("Mobile Vehicle Service"). I grabbed it, loving that I could get these five for nearly $6. I'm not sure if I'll have another plastic rectangular wastebasket filled with these kinds of vehicles, since I'm far more choosy than I was back then (If it was a car and the wheels moved, I wanted it) and I intend to treat these much more carefully.

Right now, I'm searching on Amazon for what Matchbox cars are available, and so far, there's a water truck, a garbage truck, a "Wildfire Crew Transport" truck, a dump truck, an RV camper, a dry bulk truck, a cement truck, a forklift, and a city bus I'd really like to find. And thinking about the Cheeseball Wagon food truck from the food truck festival that opened the newly refurbished Auto Row in Valencia early in the year, from which Meridith got a t-shirt, toy food trucks would be most welcome in my collection. I hope there's some enterprising minds thinking about that.