Dinosaurs (especially the fluffy one)

This is a picture of me and my dinosaurs. As you can see, it is getting a bit cramped in my computer room, but dinosaurs are supposed to be huge creatures, so they deserve the space. (And yes, I should have moved the Octapad away for before taking the picture.) The huge Godzilla is about 8 feet high, the smaller Godzilla about 6 feet and the fluffy dinosaur about the same. The first one I got was a fairly small inflateable Godzilla (about 1.5 feet high [no picture yet]). Since I've always been a dinosaur fan, my relatives decided that I might like the larger (6 feet) inflateable Godzilla and bought me one for christmas. [Before anyone gets confused about the age group involved: I'm not talking about early childhood memories here, this happened when I was 28 or something like that.] Anyway, I was very fond of Godzilla and he has been standing in my 'computer room' ever since. When Jurassic Park came out, a couple of shops had the large inflateable Godzillas in stock (yes, I know that Godzilla has little to do with Jurassic Park, but the shop probably figured that 'dinosaur craze' is 'dinosaur craze' and people wouldn't really care what file they were from), so I bought me the huge Godzilla.

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This is the dinosaur I like most. He's big, fluffy and nice, but he's not cute. (I hate cute!)

And I got him as a christmas present.

I had been visiting my sister (who lives in Bremen) a couple of years ago and they had this incredibly good looking dinosaur in the shop window. Usually I'm not too fond of stuffed toy dinosaurs, since they tend to be to colorful, misproportioned, dumb looking and cute. But this one just looked like a dinosaur. It was well made, had a nice texture in its 'fur', looked friendly, but avoided all the offensive cuteness like overlarge eyes and cuddly shape. It was large, had a nice posture and was immensly hugable. So I went into the shop and asked about the price. And left disappointed. That beast was expensive. So I spent some time standing at the window, staring wishfully at the dinosaur and that was the end of it. [If you think this is rather childish behaviour at the age of 32, here's a quote from the Dr.Who tv-series for you: "What is the use of being an adult if you can't be childish from time to time.") The dinosaur left the shop shortly after christmas. He wasn't really intended for sale anyway. He was made as a shop window decoration and moved from toy shop to toy shop in a monthly rhythm.

But I must have looked very desperatly at the dinosaur. When he turned up in the shopwindow again about a year later (shortly before christmas) my sister and her husband appearently decided that I'd very likely would like to have the dinosaur (or maybe they just thought it might be to emberassing to be seen with me pressing my nose against the window of a toy shop - I don't know and they don't tell). So they went there and tried to haggle. Trying to argue that the dinosaur has been all over Germany and was slightly battered and no longer brand new and that there should been a price reduction for that didn't help much. The price the shop had quoted already took that into account. The 'brand new' price was about twice that price. So they decided to pool up with other relatives and get it for me as a combined present for christmas. And my next birthday. And the next christmas as well. But I got my large, nice and fluffy dinosaur.

This is the fluffy dinosaur (no, I haven't given him a name) at the keyboards. Partly inspired by the fact that I like 'dinosaur rock groups', but mostly because the dinosaur has this odd positioning of the hands, which sort of works well with keyboards. (The inflateable Godzilla used to hold an inflateable saxophone, which would have made a nice accompaning musician, but the saxophone has developed a leak a long time ago, so I couldn't take a picture of them.)

More dinosaur pictures are likely to come sometimes, but it's usually a case of 'hey, there are only two pictures left on the film in the camera, maybe I should do some more dinosaur pictures', so new pictures don't happen that often.