A glutton for punishment

I've been a bad blogger this past week. The free time that I have at night, the time that's usually spent working on posts and/or reading and commenting on other people's posts, was instead spent on sorting cards and doing COMC's Challenges, neither of which I've spent much time doing in recent months.

I was kind of surprised by the sudden want to sort cards, as I think the last time I really did so was back in November. Now that I've moved on to player/person collecting (for the most part), I find myself having quite a bit of stuff that I no longer care about, and since I'm not of the "He who has the most stuff, wins!" mentality, it doesn't make much sense to keep all of this unwanted stuff around.

Basically I've just been sorting things into three piles (not literal piles), keep, give away, and sell. I've had a pretty productive week too, I'd say that I'm already about halfway through this process, and have also already started listing some of the "to sell" stuff. Another positive that has come from doing this, is that I've also found enough cards for at least six more Free Stuff Friday's, and I'm sure that the number of those cards will only continue to grow.

There has been one negative thing to come from all of this sorting though, I've found at least 20 more people that I'd like to start collections for, and about half of those are of the non-sport variety. This has also led to more time spent on COMC, as some of these collections are being started from scratch, and I've been trying to add a couple of cards to each of them. Since these cards require money, and I don't really want to add any to my account (especially now with the sales tax thing), so I've been do the Challenges instead, four or five bucks worth each day (this buys a lot of cards!).

So, like I said, bad blogger! I did try and work on a few posts here and there, but didn't get very far. Now that whole week has passed without posting, I'm feeling a bit guilty about not doing so. Since nothing's finished, I'm cranking out this quick filler post, and will hopefully have something a little more substantial to offer within the next few days.

I spent a little more time than usual on the road this past week, and as such found myself stopping in at a number of places, one of which was the Dollar Tree. As you can probably tell from the picture, I went ahead and did a thing that I said I was going to do again, i.e. buy any more packs of Hoops.

I've already made my feelings about this set known, and yet I still bought more, five packs no less! I really wish that one of these flipper's that I keep hearing about would materialize and buy out the rest of this location's stock, if only so I'd no longer be tempted by these damn things -- apparently the $1 price tag is just too low for me to resist.

If I wasn't impressed with my first three packs, you can probably already guess how I feel after five more, and if you can't, spoiler... I still don't care for them!

Since they're not any more exciting than last time, I'm just gonna blow through these packs. Does anyone else remember back when the various television commentators were trying to convince us that Chris Paul had a legitimate shot at breaking John Stockton's all-time assist record? I wonder how that worked out for him? The border is still blindingly white, but at least they used a pretty decent photo for Gordon Hayward's card.

I can't believe it, this pack actually yielded a keeper (Barkley)! Of course it also yielded a yellow parallel of one of my least players of all time.

I didn't know that these packs ever came with two rookies, not that it really matters though, as I don't think either of these are the rookies that everyone's been going apesh*t over.

Two rookies again... what the heck is going on here? Back in the 90's I had the touch when it came to picking packs, I think it's safe to say that I've lost said touch. And I know that I'm supposed to care about Jokic, but I don't.

Well, this pack has an ex-Blazer, so I guess that's something? It really isn't, but I'm trying to be positive here... can you tell?

So that's five more Hoops packs in the bag, and all of one keeper, which is slightly better than getting no keepers from my first three packs. Now if those damn vultures show up sometime before I go to the Dollar Tree again, that would be awesome.

On an unrelated, but also semi-related note, I found out this past week that the increasing pain that I've been experiencing in my right foot since about Christmas, is plantar fasciitis. I only mention this because for years I would hear of basketball players missing games due to this, and I'd always say things like "What a wuss!" or "Really, you can't play through that?", but I'm here to tell you that I was wrong, it is kind of painful, and I can see why players would miss games because of it. As for me, I've got it right in the arch, so if I stand wrong, or try to lean down with my weight on that foot, I get a shooting pain up in to my calf which causes my leg to try and buckle. Supposedly rest will take care of it, but if I haven't taken it easy all winter, I'm not about to start now that nicer weather is almost here, so I'll just have to "play" through it for the time being.

As mentioned, I'll try to get some better posts going for later in the week, but in the meantime I've got a bunch of other blogs to catch up on...


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.