David Gregory's Block Blog

I finally know how many

2008-11-17T15:23:00Z

How many of you know how many LEGOs you have? Most AFOL's have some general idea of how many pieces they own, but it's often some figure that's appended with the phrase "give or take about 50,000." If you have a LUGNET membership, you can enter the number of each LEGO set that you own. The site will then generate a set list for you that gives quantities of every set you own, sets you want to buy and sets you want to sell. (To see this list, use the URL http://guide.lugnet.com/set/mlist.cgi?m= and enter your LUGNET membership number at the end.) At the bottom of the list, there is a sum of the total number of sets and the total number of pieces.

My current set list states my piece total as 229,533 pieces.

That probably seems like a lot, and you're right—I've been collecting LEGO sets since I was a kid, and I never had a Dark Age, so I have accumulated quite a large collection. Sometimes the little devil on my shoulder even tells me that I have too many LEGOs, but I usually toss him in the trash and then listen to the little angel on my other shoulder who tells me that God wants me to have more LEGOs.

Back when LUGNET existed, but Bricklink and ebay did not, the LUGNET set list was a good way to see how many LEGOs you actually had. Back then all my pieces were from sets I had bought, so I could look at that list's total to know the size of my collection. However, there are a few flaws in the LUGNET set guide. They're not really "flaws," but gaps in information. For instance, LUGNET does not yet have the new mini Clone Turbo Tank that comes with the Brickmaster mailing. That's 64 pieces that I have in a set that doesn't show up in my LUGNET set list. The sets that are missing from the LUGNET set guide are few and far between, so those sets don't make much of a dent in my piece total. BUT there are several sets in LUGNET's guide that don't have any entry for how many pieces they have. For example the 320 BASIC Building Set has 71 pieces listed on the pictorial inventory on the box, but LUGNET doesn't have any piece count for the set, so even though this set shows up as one that I own, it adds a big fat 0 to my piece total. The same lack of information holds true to sets 337, 385, 537 (all BASIC sets from the 80's), several 3 digit sets from the 70's, and even several sets from the 90's. So my current LUGNET set list is actually showing a smaller number of pieces than what I own due to the lack of piece counts on several sets. Still, this isn't that bad when I've broken the 200,000 piece mark.

Now I know what most of you must be thinking at this point: What about all the thousands of loose parts you've bought that weren't from sets? That is a valid question indeed. With the advent of loose part sales on the internet, my collection was blessed with a rich variety of whatever I could find and afford. LUGCO member Todd Trotter first told me about Bricklink in 2000. I began using ebay the same year. Since then I've pretty much been on one long LEGO-buying binge. Two of the three main sources for buying loose parts are internet sites: Bricklink and ebay. The third source is the Pick-A-Brick at LEGO stores. If I wanted a big raw number for my Bricklink purchases, I could download it. (Did you know you can do that? Go to the Bricklink Download page, and you can download info from your entire Bricklink buying history, including number of parts in orders, shipping costs, year totals, etc.)

Loose parts certainly pose a daunting barrier to knowing how many parts you own. Luckily I began a system of keeping track of this way back when I started buying loose pieces. I have an Excel spreadsheet for each category of piece. Whenever I get an order from Bricklink or bring home a batch of non-set pieces from P.A.B. or wherever, I add the quantity of each piece to the Excel sheets. This may seem like an overly complicated and unnecessary task, but I have found it to be very helpful when I need to know how many of a certain piece I have. I have also become very efficient with my piece assimilation system over the years, so it doesn't take as long as you might think.

Now it would seem that I have a simple method for determining the total number of LEGOs that I own. I take the piece total in my LUGNET set list and add it to whatever the total is from the Excel sheets of loose parts...after all, Excel can add up all those numbers automatically, right? ...RIGHT? Unfortunately the answer to that is NO. A couple of years ago, I decided to add up all the parts in those Excel sheets to get a grand total of what I had. Excel has a sum function where it will add up the numbers in a row or column or whatever. My Excel sheets had the quantities in a single column, so I figured that it would be pretty easy to make the program show me a sum in the cell at the bottom of the column. I found out how to use the sum function, and I thought all was going well. I tried to use the sum function on my Tiles spreadsheet. The total was way smaller than I thought it should have been. I double checked the Excel sum by taking a calculator and manually adding the numbers in each cell of the column. The real sum was about 1,200 more than what Excel was telling me. Just to make sure I double checked the sum by adding it all up on the calculator again. Excel was still wrong.

There are times when I REALLY hate computers. This was one of them. I found it hard to believe that a complex program such as Excel could not do such a simple task as adding numbers. I went to the Microsoft Office site and downloaded the update they had for Office. "Surely this 27 meg of updates will fix the problem," I thought. I was wrong. Excel still couldn't ad! I tried other spreadsheets and found that a few more of them had the same problem. At that point I gave up. I wasn't going to take the time to use a calculator to add up every single number cell in every spreadsheet.

Last week I asked my sister if she could open up my Tiles spreadsheet on her computer. I knew that she had a newer version of Office than I did, and I thought that her version might do the math right. She said that she had the same number in the sum cell that I did, but it showed her these tiny triangles in the corner of some of the cells. When she clicked on the triangle it told her that the cell should be converted to a number cell. When she did that, the sum cell had THE CORRECT SUM! This was very good news to me.

I have absolutely no idea why Excel would convert random cells in my spreadsheets into non-number cells. (I'm talking seriously random; they weren't grouped together or anything.) I went through each sheet and made sure that each cell with a number in it was viewed as a number cell, then I redid the sum cells at the bottom of each column. It took a while, but I was finally able to get an accurate count of how many loose pieces I had.

I admit that I still have some work to do with this. I haven't made sum cells for my spreadsheets of minifigs, nor have I made sums for parts that are made of multiple pieces, such as elephants. I still have thousands of P.A.B. pieces laying around that I haven't assimilated into the collection yet, and a couple of tubs of other random parts that I don't have a spreadsheet for...but short by a few thousand pieces, I have:

229,533 pieces in sets and

138,622 pieces that I bought loose

for a grand total of...

Insert drumroll here

368,155 LEGOs!

I've been telling people "about 350,000" when they ask me how many LEGOs I have, so I guess I was fairly close.

I can't escape LEGO

2008-07-31T20:09:00Z

I freely admit it: my life is FULL of LEGO. My apartment, my web surfing, my thoughts—there's LEGO everywhere in my life. However, just like any other LEGO Maniac, I can't spend 100% of my time with LEGOs. I have to go to work, eat, watch movies, etc. Yet there are some times when LEGO just seems to find its way to me, even when I'm not looking for it.

Today I was looking for maps of Indiana on the internet. The sites that sell new maps are really expensive, so I started searching ebay. Guess what I find on the first page of results for "Indiana map"? LEGO! The auction was for a minifig of Indiana Jones' dad holding a 2X2 printed map tile. Even when rendered in ABS plastic the face of Henry Jones Senior stared at me with a look that said, "What were you thinking David? Did you really believe that you could spend even a few moments of your time on the world wide web without running across some LEGOs?"

Point taken Dr. Jones Sr. ... point taken.

Vintage sets on ebay can go for a LOT!

2008-04-29T00:25:00Z

I love sets from the 80's. I'm not alone, as many AFOL's consider the 1980's the middle of LEGO's "Golden Age." Specifically I have a penchant for construction sets. (Yes, yes—I realize that all LEGO sets are "construction" sets. I mean the Town sets where there's some kind of heavy machinery, and the minifigs are construction workers.)

Just like any other set collector, I love to find sets that are still sealed in their box. As you can imagine, sealed sets from the 80's fetch a premium price on ebay. A couple of weeks ago I was browsing ebay and came across a sealed 6686 Backhoe set. I knew that this set would go for at least $20. It could very likely go up to $50, and if the right people happened to be searching ebay during the auction, then it might get into the $70 to $80 range.

I put the set on my watchlist so that I could see what the final price was. After 18 bids that 7-day auction ended at $152.50! I've been watching LEGO sets sell on ebay for enough years to know that a small set going for over $100 doesn't happen very often. If the set had some exclusive minifig or part, that might explain it, but the 6686 Backhoe doesn't have any rare items. Being sealed in the original box after 24 years definitely pushes up the price on a LEGO set, but $152.50 is just crazy. Even if I won the lottery and had money to burn, I wouldn't pay that much for such a small set.

In the last couple of years, I've seen ebay auctions that made me think that all the rich people have bought what they want. What I mean by that is that rich people who have enough money to buy whatever they want have completed their "vintage LEGO I want to buy" checklists, and therefore they're not out there making high dollar bids nearly as much as they used to. The people out searching on ebay for vintage LEGO today are the ones who are still trying to complete their own LEGO collecting checklists because they've been outbid so many times over the years by those who had scads of cash. The reason I thought this is that I'd seen several vintage LEGO auctions go for a lot less that what they would have gone for just a few years ago.

...and then I see something like this recent auction, and I realize that I have to rethink my whole ebay/LEGO/online-economics theory.

Well that just sucks

2008-04-24T02:10:00Z

Some of you in IndyLUG may know that before I was a member of IndyLUG, I was a member of LUGCO (LEGO Users Group of Central Oklahoma).

Meeting with the members of LUGCO was my first experience with other AFOL's. I had communicated plenty online with AFOL's, but looking at pictures and messages on the internet is much different than having an actual gathering of people who love LEGO. At a LUG meeting you can talk face to face with others and look at their MOC's firsthand. You can make friendships in a single afternoon that are stronger than ones you spent years building online.

LUGCO meetings were always fun and laid-back. There was also little to no pressure in LUGCO to build layouts to a certain size or by a certain deadline, since we never did any shows. That's right—we never did any shows, and we always had a blast. In the beginning there were just 4 of us: Todd Trotter, Jon Palmer, Michael Daniel and me. Michael and I both lived in Oklahoma City, Todd lived in Moore in the southern end of the OKC metro area, and Jon lived in Tulsa (so he had the longest drive; about 2 hours). We met once a month and usually took turns meeting at either Michael or Todd's house.

Besides us "core 4", we had a few other guys who came to meetings once in a while. One guy, who I believe was named Jeremy Sproat, came from northern Texas. He said that the Texas LUG was in the southern half of the state, and since Texas was such a huge state, it was actually shorter for him to drive to our meetings in OKC. There was also a guy named Drew who would show up once in a while with his teenage son. There was one meeting where us 4 original members, plus Jeremy, Drew and his son were all there for a total of 7 people. That was the most people we ever had at a meeting.

Michael had one room in his house that he devoted to his LEGO collection. Two sides of the room had tables around the edge for his town. (He was basically into just Town.) We never had a set draft in LUGCO, but we did do a lot of trading. There was one of our earlier meetings where Jon and Michael had each brought a tub of colors that they didn't use much and wanted to trade. Michael had a bunch of brown and dark gray in his tub, and Jon had a bunch or white and yellow in his tub to trade. Both of them looked through each other's tubs Ooohing and Aaahing at what they found. After several trades, Jon said, "you just want to trade my whole tub for your whole tub?" to which Michael replied, "Sure."

Michael's city was something he kept displayed all the time and would add to as he built new MOC's. That made it neat to see about every 2 months, because you could look for what had changed. When I moved from Oklahoma City, I knew that I might never see any of those LUGCO guys again, which was a total bummer. However, at Brickfest 2003 I saw Jon again. I asked him about LUGCO, and he told me that he didn't live in Oklahoma anymore; he had moved out to the west coast. He said that before he moved, LUGCO activity had died way down. He had kept in touch a little with Todd, and knew that Todd had had second child with some pretty bad health problems, which had kept him from spending much time with LEGO. With myself and Jon hundreds of miles away, and Todd busy with Life's Hurdles, that meant that the only active member of LUGCO left would be Michael...and you don't have much of a club with just 1 person.

Since I've lived in Indiana, I've often wondered if LUGCO revived in any way. You can still see the website, although it hasn't been updated since 2002. (Todd made and ran the website, so I assume he has a way to keep it online cheaply &/or wants it to remain accessible for archive type purposes.)

Today I was building a gazebo, and I needed several of those hinge plates that are 1X2 on each half in white. I went to Bricklink and found the seller who had the quantity I needed at the cheapest price in the USA. That seller was MWD Brick Bytes, and I saw that the seller was from Oklahoma. I thought to myself that because of the initials "MWD," this seller might be Michael Daniel who I knew from when I was in LUGCO. As I looked through the pieces in the store, they seemed to be mostly Town type things. I also noticed the statement "This is all I have none in reserve." in the Splash page. I clicked the "Newest" link in the store to see when the seller had added most of their items. Sure enough, their entire inventory had just been added to their store throughout the month of March.

I realized that Michael had probably decided to get out of the LEGO hobby, and this was his way of selling his collection. In my head I muttered the blog-title-inspiring statement, "Well that just sucks." I understand when someone doesn't have time for LEGO. Things like kids, poor health and school can put building on the back burner for months or even years. But it really saddens me to see someone give up on LEGO entirely. I've always seen LEGO as a lifelong hobby for those of us who are really into it—and Michael was one of those people. I'm sure he spent plenty of time, energy and money on his LEGO like the rest of us do.

The email that Bricklink sends you when you order confirmed my suspicions; the seller is Michael Daniel. I guess that without really knowing the specifics of what happened in the OKC LEGO scene after I had moved, I had always subconsciously assumed that Michael, Todd and any other AFOL else who happened to come along to the LUGCO area had been building away all these years. Maybe they had been building less frequently or had decided to stop buying new stuff, but it had been a comforting thought to me that maybe, just maybe all those LUGCO members who I hadn't seen or heard from in so long still had an inextinguishable passion for LEGO. Today I learned the sad bitter reality that what I had hoped in the back of my mind just wasn't true.

Michael, if you're reading this, I just want to let you know that I really enjoyed all the time I spent with you and the other LUGCO members. I have no hard feelings toward you about getting out of the LEGO hobby, and I hope you can find something else that's just as enjoyable to take up all of your free time and empty your wallet...oh wait—you're already married.

"LEGO" in Futhark alphabet on Viking printed tile

2008-03-18T19:34:00Z

Please read ONLY if you are prepared to delve very deep into the world of LEGO nerdiness.

So we're currently in the midst of preparing our D&D characters for Jeramy's upcoming D&D game. Of course, being a LEGO club, we're using LEGO for not only our characters and their weapons and gear, but also all of the landscaping and buildings. As if that wasn't nerdy enough, I decided to learn the runic alphabet that dwarves would use, since my D&D character is a dwarf. While D&D dwarves are fictional, the runic alphabet is/was real. It's called "Futhark," because that's what the first 6 letters in the runic alphabet spell:

The Futhark alphabet is what people from the Scandinavian region of Europe would've used to write with during the Middle Ages. Enter the 1X2 printed tile from the 3rd edition of Hogwarts Castle:

I'm not sure why this tile that's printed with Futhark characters comes in a Harry Potter set instead of a Vikings set, but we can worry about that later.

You can see that the gold runes are characters from the Futhark alphabet. Ever since I was a little kid, I thought that runic characters looked cool, hence it's no surprise that I liked this printed tile and put it on my Bricklink wanted list. However, until recently I had never learned the runes' phonetic equivalents.

Today I was browsing a BL store and saw this tile. I had seen pictures of this tile before, but today was the first time that I had seen it since my eyes had been opened. The gold letters say "LEGO". But wait—that's not all! Do you see that there are also lines of tiny runes along the top and bottom of the tile? They're quite small, but you can just make out that they say "Leg Godt" (Danish for "Play Well"; the words that Ole Christiansen contracted to form the word "LEGO") and "Play Well" (in english). That is SOOOOO COOL!!! Whoever worked at LEGO and was in charge of making this printed tile actually went to the trouble of translating LEGO's name and motto into Futhark runes.

If you're shaking your head right now and think it's ridiculous that I think this is totally sweet, then you're totally lame. This is SO super cool, whether you think it is or not.

Glow-in-the-Dark my @$$

2007-09-17T02:24:00Z

Does anyone remember when I was so excited about the new Duplo skeleton figs? Well, when I was at Brickworld I bought the Duplo Pirate Treasure set that has one of the Duplo Skeletons. Here's what the front of the box looks like:

As you can see from the picture of the set, the skeleton appears to glow in the dark. Then from the inset image in the lower right corner of the box, the buyer is shown that, yes, this Duplo skeleton does in fact glow in the dark.

However, when I opened my Duplo Pirate Treasure, the plastic that made up my skeleton looked stark white. I let it absorb a decent amount of luminescence (That's a sciencey word for "light") and then took it in the bathroom where there are no windows and closed the door. It didn't glow. My Duplo skeleton was not emitting a single photon (Another sciencey word for particles of energy that make up light). My skeleton looks just like the one on Bricklink:

The plastic is just the regular white without any of that yellowish tint that glow-in-the-dark stuff has. I still like my Duplo skeleton, but I'd like him a whole lot more if he glowed in the dark like I was led to believe he did from the box art.

Say that 5 times fast

2007-08-11T03:18:00Z

I'm sure that everyone here is familiar with being outbid on ebay. Some person has the high bid, you're willing to pay more, you place your bid, the other dude's bid was higher than yours, so ebay tells you that you were outbid. Pretty simple.

I just bid on a Bricklink auction for the first time. It works pretty much the same as ebay's bidding. However, the "You were outbid" message seems like quite a tongue-twister:

Outbid!

You were outbid by the current high bidder. The high bidder's proxy bid was higher than your bid which is now the current bid but the high bidder is still the high bidder. You may try again and bid higher.

If I didn't know that Bricklink was a legitimate buying/selling site, I would have thought that this message was some kind of joke. I think that they ought to edit it down to just the word "Outbid!"

Well, now I'm off to bid some more on the Bricklink bidding to see if I can outbid the high bidders, and then I'll be the high bidder, because my high bids will be higher than the other high bidder's bids........

End of the bulk packs at Shop At Home

2007-08-04T23:40:00Z

Well I have to say that I saw this one coming. Just very recently LEGO S@H clearanced out many of their bulk piece packs/sets. With the advent of online Pick-A-Brick through LEGO Factory, I can see why they would make the change.

If you've followed the patterns of the S@H catalogs, you will have noticed that the 2 pages of bulk piece sets that used to be in the catalog's centerfold have been missing for about 2 years now. As more and more pieces became available individually online, the number of bulk piece sets that had unique pieces unavailable through LEGO Factory dropped until it was at zero. As it stands now, just about any of the pieces that you used to be able to get in a bulk pack are now available online through the P.A.B.

This is good and bad at the same time. The good part is that you can buy whatever quantity you want. You can buy 1 black 2X2 brick, or you can buy 582 black 2X2 bricks. The bad part is the price per piece. You used to be able to buy set 3457 which contained 100 red 2X2 bricks for $7, making each brick 7¢. A red 2X2 brick on the online P.A.B. is currently 11¢, which is a 57% jump from the per piece cost of the bulk pack set. The old 1X2 Tan Bricks set was 100 pieces for $6 (6¢ per piece), and now a 1X2 tan brick costs 11¢ online (an 83% jump in price).

Don't get me wrong—I love LEGO Factory and its online P.A.B. I've ordered from them several times already. The reason I love the online P.A.B. is the variety of pieces. The number of elements currently available online is far more than what it was through buying bulk packs. Some of them can be expensive, but you can often find new or rare parts there that would cost you a lot more through Bricklink. (Actually I prey upon the ignorant by filling my Bricklink store with rare parts from online P.A.B. at prices that are lower than other seller's, but still plenty profitable for me...but that's material for another blog post.) The variety keeps getting better over time. There are all kinds of bricks and plates in many colors, and several types of specialty pieces. The only area that they're really lacking in is minifig parts and accessories, but they are getting better.

It's sort of sad to see the bulk packs go the way of the buffalo, but I have to admit that what we have now is better than what we had then. The situation tugged at my heart strings a little last night when I saw so many bulk packs on clearance on S@H for 98¢ a piece (or 83¢ if you bought 15 or more). Sure, I've seen bulk packs become discontinued and clearanced out before, but that was always to make way for new bulk packs. As I viewed the list of packs last night, I knew that I'd be buying those bulk packs for the last time. [and indeed that is the truth, for tody all of the clearance bulk packs on S@H are sold out.] The remaining bulk brick packs will probably go on clearance soon. (I'm actually kind of surprised that the 2X2 "Sand" Red slope pack isn't on clearance, since it's a discontinued color.) If I ever need bulk pieces in the future, I'll have to go to LEGO's online P.A.B., a real LEGO store's P.A.B. or Bricklink. Will single baseplates go to a P.A.B.-only status? I doubt that they would, but only time will tell.

As far as buying individual LEGO pieces goes, we have entered a new era. We've had plenty of time to adjust to the changes, because they've come gradually. We had the bulk packs from S@H for decades. Around the turn of the millennium, ebay caught on, and we had some LEGO brand stores open up, which would later carry Pick-A-Brick. Of course, these two entities still overlap through the present. Soon after ebay we got Brickbay (now Bricklink), and I don't see that going away anytime soon. The newest cog in the machine is LEGO Factory. I believe that LEGO Factory's uniqueness, global scope and the fact that it is a source of pieces straight from the source will keep it firmly in place as a major player in the individual piece market.

There are enough resources out there that I can live without the bulk pack sets. I do wish that LEGO could continue to offer both bulk pack sets and online P.A.B., but I realized long ago that in the world of LEGO, I most certainly do not always get what I want. Let's face it—the majority of the bulk packs were just plain bricks or plates in normal colors, and as large as my collection is, that's something that I've accumulated quite a healthy stock of.

Oh yeah...and if you wanted to buy any of those packs of 50 green 2X4 bricks for 98¢...sorry.

Artwork for IJ video game

2007-08-02T02:04:00Z

The preview pics for the Indiana Jones (IJ) minifig that I have seen are pretty cool. As far as I know, I have only seen CG images; no actual photos of bona fide ABS figs.

Several sites have recently reported on the upcoming IJ LEGO video game that's going to come out. With those announcements has come some more CG artwork of IJ. Now I realize that since the game will be a LEGO IJ game, the characters have to look like LEGO minifigs as opposed to the real-life movie actors. Their hands aren't going to have fingers, their feet are going to be squared protrusions from the bottoms of their legs, etc., etc. However, I think that there are certain instances where the people doing the CG artwork should be allowed to take a little...shall we say "discreet" artistic license on the way they visually represent the LEGO character.

As we all know, a minifig's "legs" are made of 3 pieces: the hips/waist, the right leg and the left leg. Each leg can move forward and back but not twist or bend at the knee. Any CG LEGO character, however, will have a greater range of movement, since the animation will let them have human-type realistic joints that LEGO people don't. For instance the CG IJ can stand where his legs are sort of spread apart in a way that a real person could stand, but a LEGO fig could not.

I don't want to be too specific, but I think that they could have done a better job of representing the "hip" piece of his body that his LEGO legs snap on to. It wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't supposed to be wearing tan pants. In fact, that part in question is a little more flesh colored than the tan pants on his legs...if he's even supposed to be wearing pants that is.

The image gets even more disturbing when you notice the sly grin on his face...and the fact that he's holding a whip.

Holy crap—I've really dragged my blog into the depths this time.

Brickworld memoirs, Part 1d - The LEGO Stores on Monday morning

2007-07-25T23:49:00Z

After two trips to Northbrook on Friday and one trip to Woodfield on Saturday, I had bought up quite a supply of LEGOs. Some fellow IndyLUG guys asked me if I wanted to go to the Northbrook store again on Sunday, but I passed. I knew, however, that the special Brickworld discount went through Monday. I still hadn't used up all of my BW LEGO budget, and the only thing I had to do on Monday was drive home, so as soon as I left the Westin on Monday morning I headed for the LEGO stores.

My first stop was the Northbrook store. There were a few Pick-A-Brick pieces there of which I wanted to get a few extra. Both the LEGO store and the mall as a whole were delightfully quiet compared to my other times there. (Of course, this was no surprise since it was a Monday morning.) Luckily for me the store still had dark tan 4X8 plates, dark red 8X8 plates and dark red 8X2 slopes. Besides 2 P.A.B. cups I bought some of the old mosaic bagsof 1X1 plates. (The partial-set parts bags were buy-1-get-1-free for BW attendees.)

At this point, fitting purchases into my car wasn't too hard. The items I had just acquired at Northbrook only filled one medium sized bag. While the day was still young, I drove on to the Woodfield LEGO store where I planned to buy several sets.

Total for Northbrook, Monday morning: $42.85

The people traffic at the Woodfield Mall was also light. I didn't see anything in the P.A.B. that interested me, but I did notice that they had the new Market Street set. The fact that there were only a couple of mothers and a few kids meant that I had plenty of room to start A Stack. Besides the obvious Market Street, I got LEGO City Harbor (which is spelled "Harbour" on the price tag and receipt but "Harbor" on the box itself), the newest Creator House and the Heavy Hauler truck. It turns out that I was quite lucky on getting the Market Street set. One of the employees said that they had just gotten them in that morning.

Those sets alone were quite a stack of boxes. To top it off, I got a few more Final Joust sets, a couple Droid Battle Packs and a couple of the Build-your-own-minifigs. Then I rooted around in the partial-set bags and found a couple of the old mosaic bags with all the black slopes and a couple of the Creator house bags that had lots of white 1X3 bricks and red 3X2 slopes (buy the black slope bags, get the Creator house bags free).

I had been wanting to get at least equal numbers of Storm Trooper Packs and Droid Battle Packs. More Storm Troopers than droids would have also been good, because there are 7 droids in a pack and 4 troopers, so an even number of sets gives you uneven odds when you set them all up to kill each other. As my luck would have it, I had been able to fins plenty of the droid packs but not as many trooper packs. When I finally went to check out, I noticed a crushed Clone trooper box on the counter. I asked the guy if it was for sale. He said yes, and then said that he could give me an additional 10% off of it on top of my BW discount, since it was all smashed up. Boy, twist my arm; I guess I'll take that crummy trooper pack for a scant $6.74.

Total for Woodfield, Monday morning: $269.00

Now I had a lot of MOC's in my car to start with. Then there were all the LEGOs that I had bought Friday, Saturday and earlier that morning. When I got my Woodfield haul out to the car, I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to fit it all in there and still see out the windows. After some rearranging, jamming and tucking I was able to get everything in the car...but I was unable to see out of all the windows when in the driver's seat. But who cares, right? I could see out the windshield just fine, and that's what really counts. At least I thought that vision was all that I should be concerned about.

The air conditioning in my car doesn't work, so as I'm driving home on the interstate, I have the windows partway down. This usually isn't a big deal, but when you have stuff packed to the ceiling in plastic bags, it can be. When I packed everything in, I had tucked the open tops of the LEGO bags under the boxes so that they wouldn't flap around. I thought I had tucked sufficiently. I was wrong. About every 20 minutes at least 1 of the bags would work its way loose and start flapping the back of my head. Well, I'd say it's about time to stop at one of those Oasises to get the LEGO cargo situated better and get a hot fudge sunday. With the bags packed better and a belly full of ice cream, I was back on my way home.

Brickworld memoirs, Part 1c - The LEGO Stores on Saturday afternoon

2007-07-11T23:49:00Z

The public days at Brickworld were Saturday and Sunday. Both days were open to the public from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. 7 hours of answering those same stupid (mostly) questions that we've been hearing at shows for years is enough to drive anyone crazy, especially when you haven't been around the main hall (The Ravinia Ballroom) and seen everything yourself yet. Now no one expects any BW attendee to stay in the hall the whole time—that would just be insane. After all, people have to do the basic activities of going to the bathroom and going to get something to eat during the day.

The funny thing is that if you're an IndyLUG member, going on a trip to a LEGO store somehow also becomes one of those daily necessities. Thus it was that Jeramy, Mark, Brian Alano, Tom and myself went to the Woodfield LEGO store on Saturday afternoon. We decided on Woodfield, because we had just been to Northbrook the night before, and we were curious as to what Woodfield had. We would have to rush a bit since we had to make it back at least by 4:00 when the Saturday prize awarding ceremonies started. The Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg is further from the Westin than the Northbrook Mall, but it's still relatively close, and it's on the interstate. We planned to make it a quick trip and grab some lunch at the mall for the way back.

We arrived at the Woodfield LEGO store and found that, just as I had seen at Northbrook on Friday afternoon, we weren't the only BW attendees to think of making a mid-day jaunt to a LEGO store. The Woodfield LEGO store is the smallest LEGO store that there is, but it gets quite a bit of traffic compared to the others due to its location. (The Woodfield Mall is the biggest mall in Illinois.) Since the PAB wall is always along the back wall of a LEGO store, this makes the number of PAB bins significantly smaller at the narrow Woodfield store. Despite this limitation, we found a "holy grail" of LEGO pieces: DARK GREEN 2X4 BRICKS!!!

Dark green is one of the most highly sought after colors in the LEGO spectrum, and the 2X4 brick has only appeared one at a time in 2 large sets. Yeah that's right—it's rare...really rare. Most colors of 2X4 bricks that you see in PAB are so common that it's not cost effective to buy them at a LEGO store. The 2X4 brick in dark green in decent quantities, however, goes for about 21-28¢ a piece on Bricklink. That fact made finding them in the PAB a great deal, because we knew that all of them were new, and that we could buy them in a very decent quantity. What am I saying? The amount of dark green 2X4 bricks that we bought was so large that it was indecent. Really—it would make you physically sick with envy to see just how many of those precious sweet gems of ABS that we walked away with that day.

Jeramy and I were the ones who were really wanting to get gobs of those 2X4's. I briefly contemplated getting an entire PAB tub instead of a cup or two. The problem would be filling a whole tub in the small amount of time that we had. I looked at Jeramy and could tell that he was thinking the same thing, so I asked, "You wanna split a tub?" He agreed, and we started frantically scooping out bricks and stacking them. Luckily a 2X4 brick is a piece that's pretty easy to stack. While Mark was busy filling some PAB cups, Brian and Tom helped Jeramy and I stack the bricks to maximize our value.

A couple of men came by while we were filling the tub and asked what we were doing. Jeramy tried to explain how a 2X4 brick in dark green is quite rare, so finding them in bulk made it a great value to buy. The two guys didn't seem to understand. I think he tried explaining it a couple more times from different points of view, but it still wasn't clicking in their heads. Finally he told them, "The pieces in here [the tub] would cost us $400 to $500 if we bought them online, but we're getting this tub for $100." That monetary perspective seemed to make them finally get it.

Eventually we completely emptied out the bin of 2X4's, and when we'd stacked them all, there was still some room in the tub. Jeramy grabbed some ash 2X2 tiles while I grabbed some pink flower petals and some other tidbits. Of course, we did the obligatory shaking to make the loose pieces settle so that we could fit even more pieces in and gorge the tub to its brim. Jeramy and I were going to pay for our stuff together so that we'd make it to the $150 mark and get the full 25% BW discount. When they rang us up, I noticed that the readout thing on the front of the register said "30% off $150 purchase." When they gave us the total, we exchanged a quick that-was-cheaper-than-I-thought-it-was-going-to-be glance. I guess it paid to make the trip to the Woodfield store; they had a 30% discount instead of a 25% one. 5% isn't much, but it was a nice surprise when you're trying to stretch your LEGO budget as far as it will go.

Well, we zipped back out to Mark's truck and had to skip getting lunch. We were running a little late, but we made it back in time to get to the Michigan Ballroom before Saturday's ceremonies started. Later that night (way later that we should've been up) I brought up the PAB tub, and we sorted and split up the bounty...and somehow the big pile of dark green 2X4 bricks paled in comparison to my newly aquired

FREAKIN' GOLD C-3PO!!!

Total for Saturday afternoon: $104.54

To be continued...

Brickworld memoirs, Part 1b - The LEGO Stores on Friday night

2007-07-10T03:02:00Z

Friday night. This is what we've all been waiting for. What special stuff would the Northbrook LEGO store have? Would they have enough of what we wanted? Of the 260+ people at Brickworld, how many would be there?

The Northbrook Mall closes at 9:00 PM. The "feeding frenzy" at the LEGO store was scheduled to start at 9:30 and end at midnight. This would be the first time that the Northbrook store had hosted a special buying time for an AFOL event, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. From my experiences at the LEGO store during Brickfest, I assumed that they would have large quantities of certain sets, old &/or damaged box sets and loads of Pick-A-Brick.

The group I went with to Northbrook on Friday night was Mark, Jeramy and Leah. We planned to eat on the way there, but we didn't have much time, so we stopped at a Burger King for some fast food. The people at BK got us our food plenty quick, but we wolfed it down anyway. I think I spent as much time eating as I did placing my order...and I finished it all...well, except for my drink—I took that with me. When we got to Northbrook Mall, we had to enter at a certain door, because the mall as a whole had closed. There was some mall security guy there, and I assume that they had told him to only let people in if they were wearing a BW badge. When we got to the LEGO store, there was already a line—a BIG line. I had imagined a group of people similar in size to what I had seen waiting at the Potomac Mills LEGO Store at Brickfest (50-70 people). But oh no; this line easily had over 100 people already in it. After we got in line, about 40 more people arrived. Brian Alano, Brian Darrow, Tom and Alex were also there, so the entire IndyLUG BW contingent was present.

Some store employee started yelling something to us right before they let us enter, but we were so far back in the line that we couldn't make out what he was saying at all. The message trickled back to us that he had said they were limiting people to 1 Café Corner set. Soon they opened the doors and started letting people in. At first I thought that we'd have to wait until the first few people had grabbed their merchandise and checked out before people in our part of the line would be able to fit into the store. To my surprise the line kept steadily sifting into the doors, and we eventually all fit into the store; we were like sardines in there...but we were in there.

Something that the store did not have was old or damaged sets. Something that they did have was LOTS of Pick-A-Brick. I'm talking bushels of pieces. The normal PAB wall was available, and they had also lined the center of the store with huge totes of pieces. And from the looks if it, they really knew what kinds of pieces we'd want lots of. Here's a basic rundown of what was there that night:

2X10 clay orange bricks
2X4 dark green plates
1X6 dark red bricks
1X8 dark red plates
1X2 dark green grill bricks
1X3 clay orange slopes
2X2 ash tiles (I think Jeramy cleaned out the last of these)
6X12 dark red plates
4X8 dark tan plates
2X4 True dark gray bricks
8X2 dark red slopes
8X8 dark red plates
1X1 black plates (I think Alex wiped them completely out of those)
1X3 orange plates
1X3 medium blue plates
1X2 tan Technic bricks with 2 holes

Several people had multiple tubs that they were filling as fast as they could. The store employees had to make a few trips to the room in the back to bring us more PAB tubs. I myself just filled one tub that night. At first I was just tossing the pieces in the tub without stacking them. After a while I saw that the people I was riding with were taking quite a while stacking their pieces. I realized that I wasn't leaving any time soon, so I opened my tub and stacked a lot of the pieces so that I could fit a little more in.

There were certain pieces that were obvious favorites. The 2X4 True dark gray bricks and dark green 1X2 grill bricks went to fast that I didn't even have a chance to grab any. There were other pieces, such as the 4X8 dark tan plates, that were getting scooped up really fast, but the store had reserves, so they didn't run out. I think they had about 3 totes each of the 6X12 and 8X8 dark red plates, so everyone got their fill of those with plenty leftover.

Besides the special amounts of PAB, the store had bags from Creator sets at buy-1-get-1-free. I picked up a couple of the frame bags from the old mosaic sets. (That bag is the one that has lots of black slopes.) They also had bags of the Large Spruce Tree set and Small Spruce Tree set. I'm pretty sure that they also had the bags of 1X1 plates from the old mosaic sets, but someone cleaned them out of those. I thought that the Clone and Droid battle packs would have been snatched up pretty quickly, but I was easily able to get 1 of each with several still on the shelf. Other notable sets that I bought that night were the AT-ST, General Grievous' Starfighter, and King's Castle Siege.

Several people went to great lengths to ensure that they had packed the absolute maximum amount of LEGOs into their PAB tubs. I have to give the honorary medal of PAB tub packing, however, to John Neal. He was stacking the 2X10 bricks and then pounding them down into the tub. After he had finished his tubs (at least 2, maybe 3), someone mentioned that the corners had turned white. John and the rest of us close by looked, and sure enough, the corners of his tubs had those white stress marks that occur when you damage plastic without breaking it. A store employee lifted 2 of the tubs and was quite surprised at how much they weighed. I picked one up, and it must've weighed almost 15 pounds.

As the night wore on and midnight approached, I noticed something about the number of IndyLUG members in the store. People would checkout and leave, so the number of customers in the store was slowly going down, but the number of customers who were IndyLUG members stayed the same. If I were to chart the percentage of customers in the store who were from IndyLUG versus time, the line would start out low at about 5% (after all we were only 8 people out of the whole mob) and then climb to about 90% by the end. Let it never be said that IndyLUG AFOLs are not diligent in their frugality for more bricks!

After Friday night at the Northbrook LEGO store was done, I realized something about the wild experience that was different from other crazy retail experiences. No one got upset. We didn't have anyone fighting over pieces because they didn't get as many as so-&-so. No one complained about the long lines for the registers. Everyone left happy. There was a very cool and level-headed overall attitude in the crowd. Yes, we were all full of excitement and greed, but no one got crazy like you sometimes see at Day-after-Thanksgiving sales. Lets see... don't smoke, high rate of computer literacy, like the same things on pizza as I do, and now "don't get taken over by mob mentality". The list of good things that make AFOLs stand out from the general populace just keeps growing.

Total for Friday night: $244.96

To be continued...

Brickworld memoirs, Part 1a - The LEGO Stores on Friday afternoon

2007-07-07T21:37:00Z

Woodfield

Northbrook

The mere mention of those two locations can create butterflies in the stomachs of many AFOL's. This is especially true when these two places are destinations on your list during a LEGO fan event where there's going to be a discount for people attending said event.

During Brickworld I visited the Woodfield LEGO store twice and the Northbrook LEGO store three times. (Yes, I know I could've said "thrice" instead of "three times," but I just think I sound so snobby when I use that word.) Every visit was a great experience. I think the best way for me to catalog my adventures and thoughts from the trips to the LEGO stores would be to mention them chronoligically.

Friday afternoon

We had announced before Brickworld even started that Friday night was going to be the BIG NIGHT at the Northbrook store. Enjoying an AFOL buying frenzy at a LEGO store at night would be a new experience for me. I'd been to the Northbrook store plenty of times before, and I had been to a LEGO store for special deals during Brickfest, but those Brickfest deals at Potomac Mills had all been in the morning.

I knew from previous LEGO buying binges that sometimes my eyes are bigger than my hands. What I mean by that is that I buy so much LEGO in one trip that I have trouble carrying it back to the car. In fact I brought work gloves with me to the second Brickfest I went to, so that I could wear them on the walk from the LEGO store to the car and the bags wouldn't dig into my hands as bad. Knowing my nature, I decided that it would be a good idea to make two trips to the Northbrook store on Friday. A pre-crazy-night trip might also yield opportunities to buy sets &/or Pick-A-Brick (PAB) that the store was running low on, which would cut down on the number of things I would need to make a mad scramble for that night. Thus insatiable AFOL appetites, curiosity and a cunning early-bird-gets-the-worm mentality led Leah, Alex and I to go to the Northbrook store Friday afternoon.

Now the idea behind an afternoon trip to the Northbrook store was that it would be a quick trip...which made the gridlock traffic on eastbound Lake Cook Road a major pain. We eventually got there, and after a quick lunch went to the store. Upon entering the store, we discovered that a few other wily BW attendees had had the same idea that we did.

I was happy to see a big pile of the new Café Corner sets. (I had to pick one up then, of course, since they'd probably sell out that night despite the healthy stock level.) An unexpected surprise was lots of black Duplo dragons that were already SUPER cheap! The store's regular sale was buy 1 Duplo dragon at $3 and get 1 free. The us BW attendees got an additional 25% off of that. I also picked up a 10176 King's Castle set that was half off, some of the smaller new Castle sets, a stack of green baseplates and various other odds and ends.

It hadn't taken me too long to choose my purchases, so I had my stuff in bags and paid for in a fairly short amount of time. Alex and Leah, however, had decided to get PAB tubs. I am extremely grateful to whoever it was in the LEGO company that thought of implementing the PAB tubs. For AFOLs such as myself, who often buy 10+ one-liter sized cups in a single trip, the tubs are such a blessing. The tubs hold the volumetric equivalent of 12 of the large size $13 cups, but they only cost $100 (or $75 for us fortunate few). Of course filling a tub with pieces from the PAB wall takes a bit more time than buying just sets. As I watched Leah and Alex fill their tubs, I could hear a nagging voice inside my head telling me that I too wanted—nay needed to fill a tub. As I gazed into the bins in the PAB wall I could feel the new shiny pieces staring at me with longing in their eyes. "Buy us now! Buy us now! Don't wait 'til tonight, or we'll all be gone! We want to go home with you David, you and no other."

How could I resist? I grabbed a PAB tub for the first time and started loading up. Since I was just starting at this point, it means that I'm now the lagging strand (DNA reference). Fortunately I'm a pro at speed stacking LEGO parts. Towards the end of the tub, I just raked some stuff in to fill it without stacking. The discount we got as BW attendees was tiered, and the 25% discount was the maximum; awarded when we spent $150 or more...in a single transaction. I had already paid for my other stuff, so my $100 PAB tub wouldn't get me the full discount. I got a $50 7093 Skeleton Tower to get my total to $150. Now these dollar amounts I've been spouting off are rounded to the whole dollar. In reality the PAB tubs are $99.99, and the Skeleton Tower is $49.99. That made my total $149.98—just 2¢ shy of the max discount. (I'm sure there's a joke to be made somewhere in there about "my 2¢" but I can't think of one right now.) Anyway I added a Final Joust set to the pile to get me over the top.

Total for Friday afternoon: $367.55

To be continued...

It's a small world

2007-07-02T21:18:00Z

Well, it's a small state anyway.

Yesterday I went to my Lifegroup (a small group get together with people from church), and this guy Joe asks me, "Do you know anyone named Andy Taylor?"

"No Dad, it was Alex Taylor," his 10-year-old daughter says.

Once we had the name right, we figured out that they had run into Alex at a garage sale while--you guessed it--hunting for LEGOs. Joe had heard Alex ask the garage sale people if they had any LEGOs, and Joe immediately thought to ask if he knew me. I guess for some odd reason Alex actually admitted to knowing me.

We AFOL's are getting pretty well known, and it's becoming easier and more common for us to share our love of LEGO, so I guess things like that are bound to happen. That plus the fact that Indiana has quite a high famous-AFOL-per-capita ratio.

Baggie recycling

2007-06-02T02:23:00Z

I have baggies...a LOT of baggies. The vast majority of Bricklink orders that I've received over the years were shipped with the pieces in baggies of various sizes. I have a ton of the things in every size that they've ever been made in. I just threw them in a box and said to myself, "Self, if you ever open a Bricklink store someday, you can use all these baggies that you've accumulated."

Well, I was right. I've had a Bricklink store for 2½ years now, and I've never had to buy a single baggie. However, I did do something with a baggie yesterday that I've never done before. I got a BL order in the mail, unpacked it and then used a baggie from that same order to pack an order that I was mailing out that same day. I've never had a turnaround time for just a couple of hours on a baggie before.

On a side note, I've also never had to buy a single box or piece of bubble wrap. I work at Menard's, and we go through tons of that stuff. Any used cardboard or packing material that would get thrown into the compactor is free game for employees to have.