I'm back!

Obviously, I've been neglecting this thing for a while, but I'm back! Exciting things have happened! I went to Pennsic (more on that later), moved into a new apartment with my boyfriend, and got a new job, all in one month. I'm exhausted. Anyway, back to geeky business.

My (very awesome) coworkers, who I will miss SO much, got together to get me the best going away gift ever. A Lego set! Specifically, 9468 Vampyre Castle.

I'm not sure why Lego has chosen to spell vampire incorrectly, but it bothers me a lot. Luckily the set is cool enough to make up for bad spelling. I was going to hold off on building it until closer to Halloween, but I was too excited. It took me about three and half hours to complete (including copious snack breaks and True Blood distractions, as I was finishing up the season while I built.)

I took a TON of pictures as I built.
                               

All the bags, stickers, and two instruction books.

Lego's been breaking their sets up into numbered bags, so you're only dealing with a smaller number of pieces at any one time. I think this'll certainly help kids, and cut down on the number of "missing piece" issues, but it does take away some of the challenge. I have noticed that the really big sets they have which are intended for the 14+ crowd don't have numbered bags. Anyway, I took a picture of the contents of each bag as I sorted, and the completed product of each bag.

Bag 1 had the minifigures, and Monster Fighters' car:

Bag the First

The cannon in the back of the car shoots a net. Presumably for catching monsters. 

The heads of both the Vamp[i]res glow in the dark, and I love the sand green color for the car. The only problem is that the car only seats one, and there are two Monster Fighters. I guess the other one has to hitch hike home afterwards.


The second bag made a small tower.

The tower has a prison in the base (complete with shackles!) and has a cauldron with a toadstool and frog in it on the top, but I only got a good picture of the outside of the tower. Normally, I don't apply stickers to my Lego sets, but they seemed so crucial to the look of this set that I made an exception. They glow in the dark, too.

Bag three made the front gate and also had a glow-in-the-dark spider. You're probably sick of seeing pictures of sorted pieces at this point, so I'll just include one's of built things.

I especially like that they made this set asymmetrical in a lot of ways: the two turrets on the gate are different heights, in this case.
The gate and the first tower connect: in this picture you can see the toadstool I was talking about earlier.

The fourth bag made another tower, this time with a pit trap at the bottom! Look at all those spikes:

The fifth bag made the underground crypt, which actually doesn't look very cool. It does have a coffin in it, but that's about all it had going for it. So no picture!
At this point, my very limited photography skills began to break down. The last bags made a bedroom, a bookshelf, an attic with a pipe organ, and some weird moon/gem/spiral thing. It's the thing with all the different colored pieces at the top of the big tower:

So that's it. I don't think I've properly conveyed all the cool touches this set has: the way the different structures connect is neat, and each has its own little unique bits.