parts and accessories

it all started last week when i mentioned to marko in passing that i thought those miniature towns that people make are interesting. he raised an eyebrow tilted his head slightly to the left and said "miniature towns?". gulp. you see, marko is interested in all hobbies that come with accessories, lots of accessories. some might even say his hobby is finding hobbies with accessories. i knew from his enthusiastic questioning that he was thinking about how many accessories a miniature village must have. i was in trouble.


after ample questions and some preliminary looking online we decided to go for a late night walk to canadian tire (a luxury which we had all but forgotten in months of late) to peruse their christmas department. marko was immediately drawn to the little train with it's little track. i had anticipated this though and was armed with my convincing argument about why we don't need a miniature train. turns out that it wasn't to scale though (seriously look at those people in that house, they would never fit in that train!) and so it just wouldn't do. how could i have been so foolish? so we looked at the little houses and churches and bookstores instead and then we said "let's think about it" and trudged back home in the torrential rain that has been plaguing us everyday.

it was the next day when we went to costco though that my will to resist broke down. they had a complete set and the buildings were nicer than the ones at canadian tire. it had all the things a small town could want, a bookstore, city hall, a denominationally ambiguous church, toys and a skate rink with little men that actually play hockey (or at the very least jitter around on magnets). i sat there in the aisle staring at it in awe. marko sat there thinking about how well it would go with the $300 train he planned on talking me in to. i couldn't resist, i needed this little village to be mine.

so that was the start of what turned out to be a very involved, perfection "just a little more to the left" based project. after two more trips to canadian tire to buy...yes you guessed it, accessories, (which in this case meant trees and lights and little garbage cans that have raccoons eating out of them) and then 4 hours of poking and prodding, pondering and philosophizing, we ended up with this, our own little utopia bought, built and displayed weeks before such a thing is technically acceptable. it is our nerdliness at it's finest.

i would like to say that we did it for cohen but that would be a lie, or at least most of a lie and a quarter of a truth. we did it for us, but in the end i think cohen is the one who loved it the most (followed closely by baka who shed a tear when we first plugged in the lights). he still sits there staring in wonder at the lights and the moving hockey players and all those trees. his eyes ask the obvious question, how did that get here? and why? and his smile tells me that in a few years he will be the one out at the canadian tire buying one more car for that expensive train that dad will inevitably make me buy next year to make the city just right.