Photo Mission! (With a Mini Review of Posea Reef)

It's been a bit of a rocky start to the new year for me.  Family distractions caused me to take a step back and look closely at the blog.  When I first started blogging, I read an article describing how it can take, on average, five years of hard work before it's clear whether or not a new blog will be successful.  That seemed reasonable, and so I promised myself that I'd get to work and not worry too much about success (whatever that means) until at least four years had passed.  Now, four years later, I find myself wondering about the success of my blogging approach.

There are so many things I love about this blog--things that I consider a huge success.  First of all, I love to photograph dolls and write about them.  And, there's an incredible selection of amazing dolls out there to review.  I feel like the proverbial kid in a candy shop most days.  In addition, I get a lot of visitors or "page hits" (the brass rings of blogging) and am about to hit the 6,000,000 mark, which is unbelievable.  I also love you guys.  I'd wager that few blogs have such an amazing, kind, insightful audience.  But the bottom line is really all about...well, the bottom line.  The harsh reality is that this blog is losing money.  Lots of money.  Breaking even would be one thing, but losing money is starting to be bad.  This could be my fault, or just the way blogs are these days.  I don't know.  But I can no longer pretend that this is my job.  It's kind-of the opposite.

I like blogging too much to give it up completely, but my approach definitely has to change.  While I figure out what all of this means, I thought I would publish the wonderful contributions from the last Photo Mission.  I asked to see pictures of the interesting dolls for sale in your part of the world.  I added my own photographs to this post and will also include two short reviews.  One of the reviews is of a doll that I found during the Photo Mission: Monster High's new mermaid, Posea Reef. Snapping pictures of Posea on the store shelf was not enough--I wanted to get a closer look at her:

Monster High Posea Reef, $19.99.

Monster High Review: The Meowlody and Purrsephone Sister Set

There's been a lot of Monster High excitement lately, at least in my house.  Do you remember back in January when I mentioned that Meowlody and Purrsephone went up for pre-order on Toys R Us for about 5 seconds?  Well, I pre-ordered the set then, but didn't actually believe they'd ever come.  I mean, the whole Monster High availability thing has been strange, don't you think?  In fact, I'd love to collect data on this.  Which dolls are showing up where?  Here in Maine, we have a lot of Skull Shores dolls, and that's about it. The Sweet 1600 dolls were easy to find for about three weeks and have now disappeared.  There was one huge shipment of Nefera DeNile and Operetta, and then nothing since.  I have still only seen two of the original Abbey Bominables in the store and have never seen a single Cupid.  I think I'll start a new poll about this.  The old poll revealed that 62% of you think JAMIEshow Lee looks best without a wig, which is pretty definitive, so I think we're ready for a new poll.

Anyway, out of the blue, the feline twins arrived yesterday.  I have not seen them in stores here yet, so I am glad I pre-ordered.  I was a bit nervous about ordering these online, though, since hand-picking a Monster High doll is significantly safer than buying one sight unseen.  Still, I figured it would be educational to see the quality level of a random sample.  Here they are:

Monster High Meowlody and Purrsephone gift set.