One thing I kinda miss (not really, but Nostalgia Feels) from childhood Transformer collecting was the money gathering exploits to buy my plastic robots.  My family’s income…fluctuated throughout most of my childhood.  My dad worked the same job since I can remember until we move to Arkansas when I was 14, my mother flipped between trying to run her own business and going back to bookkeeping/accounting for different companies, usually in the restaurant business.

I got a 5 dollar allowance for pretty much my whole adolescence, so if I wanted toys, it was buy one or two small ones maybe on Saturday or supplement/find/scrounge up cash otherwise, cause Christmas was once a year and that was pretty much my parents’ rule for the only time they would just buy me stuff (until we spent that year REALLY on the high hog, but that’s another tale).  I got the occasional off-season toy purchase when my mom or dad were just feeling like it (comics were a free pass weekly from the drugstore, my parents had no issue with me reading, same for comic strip collections and regular books, just had to ask), but mostly, it was up to me. Continue reading Scrounging the Smelting Pool →