1. The Wolfpack: I saw this documentary with a friend yesterday, and it absolutely fascinated me. The film is about a family of seven children who were, somewhat inexplicably, raised in isolation in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I went into the film knowing only the information I just gave you, so that’s all the detail I’m going to give here. Have you seen The Wolfpack? If so, what did you think?
2. Arrow Action Figure by DC/Gentle Giant: I was hunting for one of these at Comic-Con, but all I ever saw was the Deathstroke action figure (which is also awesome). This week I was browsing the toy section of the Union Square Barnes & Noble—they have quite the selection of Funko Pops!—and I was about to leave when Arrow caught my eye. The price was $24.95, but as a Barnes & Noble member I get 10% off…so I paid less than $23 for this guy! Had I found him at Comic-Con he probably would have been at least $40 (the Deathstroke I saw was $30). Score!
3. Funko Avengers: Age of Ultron Mystery Mini Bobblehead…Hulkbuster! Because I watched this movie on the flight back from San Diego I picked up a box to see which characters you could potentially get. When I picked the box up it felt a lot heavier than your average Mystery Mini, and when I looked at the back of the box I knew it had to contain Hulkbuster Iron Man. I picked up another box to compare weight, which confirmed that it was Hulkbuster, so I bought it for my husband…and he loved it!
4. Our bookshelves, organized. When we moved into our new place, we had a deadline for unpacking because the bins we rented were getting picked up on a certain date. That deadline caused us to throw all our books on the shelves any which way, leaving me with a hell of an organizational project. This past weekend I tackled the bookshelves and am very pleased with the way I organized them. I know you can’t really tell much of a difference from the below before (left) and after (right) photos, but having organized bookshelves is a big relief to me. I like to organize by author and theme rather than by size, alphabetical order, or color. So there’s a shelf that has a bunch of zombie books, a shelf with sci-fi, shelves with classic literature, a shelf with books about witches and magic, etc. Stephen King gets an entire shelf and a half to himself (obviously). There’s not much rhyme or reason to which themes go on which shelves other than the fact that I like my personal favorites to be around my eye level. And there are some toys thrown in here and there for fun (my Dexter bobbleheads sit atop a stack of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter book series, for example).
5. Windsor Farms Market: this Key Food supermarket opened up at the end of my block a week ago today. It’s right next to a Walgreens, whose space used to be a Key Food until it closed down a few years ago. Windsor Terrace is a small neighborhood, and the Key Food closure caused residents a lot of strife, as they were left with very few decent places to buy groceries. Neighborhood activists, fortunately, managed to gather enough signatures to persuade Walgreens to put an annexed Key Foods next door. This market has now been a long time coming (seriously—the new Key Food was announced more than two years ago), and the excitement around its opening is palpable. I’ve been there several times already, and while it’s no Whole Foods—we got ridiculously spoiled living so close to the Gowanus location in our old place—it does have a really good selection and I’m very happy to have it so close to our apartment.
