Three Months

Boy, I’ve been slacking over here.

I will tell you, my readers, that the biggest obstacle to my regular posting is almost always an aversion to scanning things.

Here’s how it goes:

1. I get something new, or come across something old that I haven’t shown off anywhere in a while, if ever.

2. I get excited about it.

3. It goes in a pile.

4. The pile gets bigger.

5. I curse the pile.

6. I eventually scan the pile, but then it takes me forever to write about it or I forget to.

So, in the interest of breaking that trend, let me throw a few things in your general direction from the past 3 months.

Pedro here comes from Bo, which, if you’re familiar, you know that he sent me a lot more than Pedro. Bo is a very frequent contributor to The Pile Of Things I Really Like But Really Don’t Feel Like Scanning Right Now.

I also got a bunch of ’03 Finest from Bo, including this Adam Dunn. They don’t hit it out of the park every year, but there are some gorgeous Finest sets out there.

I should really just bite the bullet and grab and ’89 Score Rookie & Traded set already. I love the cards I have from it so far (especially my PSA 10 Griffey, maybe my favorite of his cards, even including That Card), the photography was really solid for the time, and the card design (border colors, etc.) always seems to pop more than it does on the base ’89 set.

I’m going to limit the view of my Bo trade acquisitions to about 1/1000th of the deal for now (Thanks, though, Bo!), and move onto some other cool pickups, just to spread the love around.

I am up to 7 Eri Yoshida cards, thanks (I believe exclusively) to Ryan, who was super-patient while I took forever to get to his want list.

Ryan also sent me a metric ton of menko, including all of these Tiger Mask cards! If you can’t quite nail down the form factor, they’re slightly larger (and much thicker) than tobacco cards/Allen & Ginter minis. I’ve got doubles of a good number of these, too (lesser condition, but c’mon), so if you’re interested, let me know. Thanks, Ryan!

Another long-in-gestation trade was one I made with Adam from Infield Fly Rule. He threw me a bunch of set fills, largely from his Rockies stash, but the showstopper in the deal was this one…

I love me some Gold Label cards, and I rarely get any ’98s. Thanks, Adam!

Honorable mention at this point goes to Greg at The Collective Mind, who was part of the other trade that had been proposed years ago, and we finally got to when I was cleaning out my inbox this past month. Greg sent me a nice handful of Topps football set fills that, unfortunately, got filed before I could scan highlights of, but they are just as loved and appreciated as the stuff I did scan, I assure you! (Perhaps even more in some regards, because I didn’t have to scan them!) Thanks, Greg!

I also picked up these recently…

I had not noticed, until I scanned them, how oddly cut they were. Still fun cards that I’ve never had any of before. If y’all are interested, and condition doesn’t bother you much (obviously Fleer had some cutting issues, but some also have corners I wouldn’t describe as 100%, and the cards are bowed just a bit from storage, as well…think of them as “not getting submitted to PSA, but MY WORD, MAN, MICHAEL JORDAN FORESHADOWED SPACE JAM BY LIKE 5 YEARS!!!!” cards), I have 8 more complete 6 card sets of these. Let me know if you’re game for a deal.

Even with as much progress as I’ve made on trades of late, it isn’t all I’ve been doing. After a very long stretch of living out of boxes, we’ve just about got the living room done at the not-so-new house now (almost here 2 years already…time flies…). So, I’ve spent a decent chunk of this week reacquainting myself with some old friends…

My (Ninja) golf game still needs some work.

Beat the game yesterday with Chun-Li and Wolverine, without too many continues.

I am so woefully out of practice on this one, but it’s so ridiculously awesome that who the hell cares?

This one, I’m still pretty damned good at. I even started a new Career Mode game just so I’d see how well I played on default stats, and yeah, I still got it.

On the other hand, this one, try as I may, I can’t beat battlefield #6. Halp.

I told y’all I’d be writing about more than cards here, and I meant it. I’ve read a bunch of comics lately, and I’ll eventually go into more detail there, but for now, you can check out my recommended reading in the sidebar of this site.

Oh, and I went on vacation, too.

That’s also probably a story for a longer post, though. In the meantime, enjoy the teaser pics, and I will hopefully see you all back here in less than 3 months!

A benching, some odds and ends from last weekend’s flea market trip, and a bonus…

So, I’m kinda benched right now.

On Wednesday, I had my gall bladder removed, and while I’ve been doing pretty well, knock wood (down to Tylenol and Advil in under 48 hours, driving solo for short distances already, minimal discomfort overall, even made it out to Free Comic Book Day, Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 2 and the supermarket today), I really don’t wanna push it any more than I already have been, so tomorrow, as per my own orders, no flea market for me, and really, no anything for me aside from desk activity and bed rest.

As far as doctor’s orders go, rather than my own, I’m not supposed to lift or carry anything that’s got any real weight to it for 4 weeks (I’ve been sticking to that recommendation pretty well, at least), so a lot of my card activities are benched or at least siginficantly slowed down until until May 31st, anyway (if we’re in the middle of a trade, please keep this in mind). Taking that into consideration, it’s not a bad thing for me not to be tempted by cheap box lots full of crap so soon.

If I have an especially good recovery week, I may end up in Brimfield on Thursday, but again, I’ll be taking it very easy (probably a 1 or 2 field trip, max), not lifting or carrying anything heavy (not *that* hard there, given what I collect and who tends to bring what there), and I am supposed to get some walking in, as part of my recovery orders. Also, if I’m being honest here, most of my Brimfield trips are done for photography purposes nowadays, anyway, though I have found a big lot or two there over my couple of seasons of visiting the market.

I did, however, get to my local flea market last weekend, and I found some fun stuff (then managed to get a late day bonus adventure out of it). My layoff will finally give me some time to get a post up about it, too!

First up, I’ll give you an overhead view of the bigger of the 2 boxes that I got. It looks like there’s a lot of “the other three sports” in it, and there was, but there was a surprising amount of baseball in it, including a bunch of ’94 Upper Deck, ’01 Fleer Platinum, and ’98 Score base and Rookie and Traded that I needed. So, while most of the box is admittedly in my “getting dumped on Craigslist” pile, it ended up being ultimately worthwhile.

Then, there was a smaller, but way more useful box that I got. We’ll get back to it in a minute.

I also got a cheap box of toploaders that, while they may be pretty boring, saved me a dedicated trip to a fine topholder retailer, and at a fraction of the cost!

Hey, it’s a cheap copy of Halo! Ever since my partner found out that I had an original XBox, they’ve been hinting that they’d like to play some Halo, but I am probably the only XBox owner who’s never owned a copy. Now, you would think that tracking down a copy of what had to have been one of the biggest-selling console games of all time in 2017 would be fairly easy, with the glut of cheap disc console games at flea markets and garage sales (along with CDs, DVDs and PC software, flea markets are choked with Playstation 2-3 and XBox/360 stuff anymore), but nope, finding a clean copy of it took months of hunting. Thankfully, it was only a couple bucks!

NICE

Pro Tip: this is a good album.

I took a gamble on this, as well. I love Cadaco stuff (more the baseball game than the football one), it was cheap, and the box looked OK. I just checked it out. It is complete, and the lightbulb still works, too! Man, are the game rules obtuse, though.

Here’s one I didn’t pick up (or ask a price on), but I figured I’d show y’all a picture of…

As I’ve come to find out, this is an RCA Radiola 25, circa 1925 according to The Radiola Guy. It’s missing its antennae, but the tubes were all there, and my word, was the cabinet in gorgeous shape. I mean, look at that thing. That’s a 91-92 year old piece. Not my area of expertise at all, but a lot of other people who had no idea what they were looking at stopped and gawked at this beauty.

Anyway, back to the cards, before I pick up another bad habit. As you can see, there’s a 1997 Donruss Limited Limited Exposure card on the top of the small box, so let’s start there. Well…

There were a lot of those in there, but sadly, a lot of doubles, too (this picture is just the doubles), so I could only put together about half the set. There’s no way I’m gonna try to build it (they’re fun and shiny, but the double face thing combined with my not having a great frame of reference for it, and my already being in the middle of 439384292 sets rules it out), so I’ve got some for trade. (I think that was the only Rivera card, though, so that’s mine.)

Hey, remember ’08 Own The Game? Yeah, I hated it, too. Some decent players in there, though, and I got a bunch of them. I have to check through my stuff when I can, because I’m David Ortiz and Mike Lowell away from a set of it. The pile here, with good ol’ Adam Dunn on top, is my doubles pile. Ask if you’re looking for any of it.

Hey, it’s a pile of Mantle inserts! This is #46-55 of whichever Topps Mantle insert set this was, plus a handful of doubles from those numbers. Up for grabs!

Hey, it’s another pile of Mantle inserts! This is Home Run History #502-536, with another decent chunk of doubles underneath it. I already had a bunch of HRH to unload, so hopefully this will motivate me to get on that. If you’re looking for Home Run History stuff, come find me!

 

I think I got multiples of this, too, but this was a Trading Card History insert I still needed. Got an A-Rod I needed as well, but you don’t need to see it. I may someday finish that set.

There was a bunch of other stuff in the small box, but it’s in a box I’m not allowed to lift, so let’s move onto the big box, and some of the Upper Deck haul, before we go back to the small box for something.

Needed it.

Needed it, and there was a double.

Needed it.

Needed it, and between the two boxes (found some in both), I got 3 of these.

…and needed it.

So, about the other thing in the small box.

Why the hell am I showing you an ’87 Topps Billy Jo Robidoux? I mean, aside from that he has a great name, and was, at one time anyway, a guy whose name you’d hear in the same sentence as Jose Canseco’s, when people talked about baseball prospects? Haven’t I spent most of my life complaining about ’87 Topps cards?

Well…as it turned out last weekend, by chance, I heard about a mall card/comic show not too far from me. Remember those? Some love ’em, some hate ’em, but I grew up at them, and I still have a soft spot.

As it turned out, when I looked at the web site for it, they had free signers on Sunday. Mike Trombley was one, and, yes, Billy Jo Robidoux was the other. I had thought about digging through cards to find stuff from both guys to get signed, but I didn’t end up having time to do so, so I hadn’t planned on going to the show. But then, among the flea market bounty, I found what turned out to be an unusually useful ’87 Robidoux, about 90 minutes before Billy Jo was scheduled to finish signing, so…

For whatever reason, I didn’t get a picture with him (I get weird about people sometimes; didn’t even talk to Trombley, but I didn’t wanna bother him if I had nothing for him to do), but Billy Jo Robidoux was a super nice cat. From what I gather, they both live in my general area, and do this sometimes, so I’ll probably see more of them.

I didn’t do much actual shopping while I was at the show (I had over 3000 cards waiting at home for me that I hadn’t finished sorting yet, after all), and the comic stuff was fairly pedestrian, but it was a pretty vital card marketplace, and I got to get another look at what dealers charge for stuff around here (hint: way more than I do when I do card shows, so I’ll probably do OK if I set up at one). There were a few other guest signers there, but alas, I didn’t get to talk to Marlon Starling (I’ll have to look through my boxing stuff and see what I have of his, in case he’s around again; he could be an interesting guy to talk to, having gone 25-0 to start his pro career, having fought Floyd Mayweather Sr., and having fought the fights that I first remember hearing about him from as a kid, against Mark Breland, though I can’t remember if I actually saw either of those fights), Shane Douglas (I’ve no idea why I didn’t say hi; again, I get weird about people sometimes), or Denny McLain (would’ve been nice to talk to him again, but he was doing a radio call-in show while I was there). I’d actually forgotten Denny was even supposed to be there. He was listed as a guest on the site, but for some reason, I processed his appearance as a Saturday thing, when Denny just sets up tables at card shows for the weekend now and hangs out, rather than being a one-day/guest of honor deal.

Still, it was a fun little adventure to cap off what was already a solid day.