Archie Mcphee - Wonderfully Weird

Anytime we are in the Wallingford neighborhood, we are tempted to go to Archie McPhee. Established in 1983, Archie McPhee has been entertaining shoppers with storefronts in Fremont, Ballard and now in Wallingford.  The colorful storefront only hints at the spectacular finds inside.

Plus anthropomorphic Bacon!

The store is a smorgasbord for the senses.  Some of favorites are:

The mass variety of mints (everything from banana to absinthe, with unflavored available for your nihilist friends and brain flavored to slow down the zombies.);

Band-aids of every size and style; 

Costume basics such as mustaches, hats and embelishments; 

the plethora of hand accessories;
 

Coffee cups that strike from the deep;

The Wallingford Beast;

Caution tape for every occasion;

Soap opera music boxes;

and amazing masks such as this Banana Slug.  

Whomever you may be shopping for, Archie McPhee probably has what you are looking for.... and some things you didn't know you needed. 

Treasure Hunting! - Finders Keepers @ Lincoln City, OR

Floats Photo from www.visittheoregoncoast.com

Our family loves a good treasure hunt.  Whether it's keeping an eye on the ground on our walks for discarded change or searching out hidden treasure in Geocaches, we love the thrill of hunt.  So when we heard about Finders Keepers in Lincoln City, OR we were immediately intrigued.  

Finders Keepers is an annual event along the 7+ miles of beaches that has over 3000 hand blown glass floats and other items hidden for the public to find.  Glass float hunting was a popular hobby up until a decade or so ago.  Japanese fishing boats previously used hand blown glass floats to float their nets.  During storms, and through wear and tear, the floats would come loose and people would find them along the coast.  As fishing boats turned more and more to plastic buoys, floats became harder to come by. 

As a nod to the past, Lincoln City sponsored the first Finders Keepers in 1999.  Growing to the more than 3000 glass items that will be hidden from October to Memorial Day, Lincoln City has created the perfect excuse to visit the coast out of the traditional tourist season.  So we will be heading to Oregon at some point this winter to try our luck...You should head to the beach too! 

Gotta Catch Them All - Pokemon Go!

 We are a pop culture loving, video game playing, movie watching family.  That being said, we prefer games that allow us to play together.  We are drawn to trivia games like You Don't Know Jack and Scene it?, as well as group games like Mario Kart, Peggle, Mario Party and Super Smash Bros.  So when Pokemon Go! was announced we were both wary and intrigued. If you haven't yet begun you journey to be a Master Pokemon trainer, Pokemon Go! is an augmented reality gaming app that gets you outside to track down Pokemon.  

Now while only one of us is really into Pokemon, the game drew us all in fairly quickly.  By the second day of playing, we were planning a trip downtown to see if we could find rare Pokemon.

Hanging with his non-digital brethren. 

Our favorite part of the game (besides collecting them all) is that it gets us outside and moving while also keeping us engaged with each other.  On our walk downtown, our youngest worked as the spotter, letting us know each time the phone vibrated when a Pokemon was near and our oldest directed us towards better areas to track them down.  All said and done, we walked over 6 miles together tracking down elusive Pokemon.  Six miles of laughing and hanging out as a family... Just keep track of where you are so you don't stop traffic trying to catch a Pikachu.   

Pokemon Go is available on both iTunes and Android. 

$5.93 or Keep Your Eyes On The Ground

Over the last year our youngest and I have kept an eye to the ground.  It all started when we found a few pennies on one of our daily walks.  He asked if they were fake and, when I said they were real, asked why they had been thrown out.  It began a talk about the value of little things and how the things that some people thought had little value meant more to others.  We also discussed how little treasures added up quickly, both monetarily and in life.  We decided to collect what we found in a special container and total it after a year.  $5.93....134 coins....one little treasure almost every other day.  We are about to start a new year of treasure hunting....I think we'll keep looking down. 

Geocaching Part II - Travel Bugs and other Trackables

The Dead Are Rising, (And They Have Never Been More Adorable)

 

I talked about Geocaching, or Modern Treasure Hunting, in a prior post.  The hidden treasure nature of the game it the main draw for my boys, but they have started to explore the other facets.  Trackables are their new favorite.   A trackable is an item or tag that has been etched with a unique tracking number and is registered at one of the geocaching websites.  Once the owner places it in a geocache, any new finders of the trackable log their find online and move it to a new geocache.   Some of these trackables will travel many thousand miles all over the world (one's even been to the International Space Station!)  As for our trackables, our farthest traveled one has traveled 29,000 miles and counting

, but our current favorite is Run Frodo! which is currently traveling through New Zealand.

Kang The Slightly Menacing