Post-Christmas post

Since I haven't seen anyone say otherwise, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that everybody had a pleasant enough Christmas? Mine was fine, a little different this year, but still okay.

I've mentioned it in year's past, but my mom and I have sort of developed a tradition in recent years to go on a hike Christmas day, which is also her birthday, but we didn't do so this year, at least not yet. She was a tad under the weather (not the Rona, or anything else serious) for a couple of days there, so we didn't go out, but are gonna try to go out sometime next week and make up for it. Temperature wise, it's been pretty good here for the last week or so, and was a relatively pleasant 64° on Christmas day, and while the hike was off, I did spend a couple of hours in the afternoon outside doing, well, outside stuff -- much to the awe of the many people that drove by and had to look at me as they did so. 

As far as presents go, there weren't any, at least none that I can show off here on the blog. Some months ago my mom and I agreed to not exchange gifts this year, and would instead go halfsies on a six-month premium subscription to Newspapers.com. We waited until their Black Friday offer, which I think was for $54, to sign up. And I know that for my part, the subscription has already gotten plenty of use. I really love that site! Despite this year's "ban" on traditional Christmas presents, I did still get her a couple of birthday presents, both of which went over well, yay me!

I think that this was the first year, or at least the first year in the last couple, that I didn't post anything on Christmas itself. I had intended to, but after thinking about it, I decided to give everyone a break. It was the right decision. 

Speaking of posts, today's was originally gonna be another homemade solution to storing tricky sized cards in binders (overly thick cards this time) but I've tweaked my original idea some, and needed something that the Dollar Tree apparently doesn't carry anymore to try and complete that prototype. So, it'll probably have to wait a few weeks until I can go to the much further away Hobby Lobby, which also means that the planned post will have to wait a little longer as well. I'm not the sort who's able to write multiple posts in advance, and rarely plan even one post in advance, so when the planned one falls through like this, I'm kind of shit up a creek. It's not ideal, but I do have two boxes of cards from COMC to tap into, at least the ones that haven't already been paged away before getting scanned (that's way too easy of a habit to fall into). This being my only option to fall back on this week, I think I'll just pull a few out and try to make a post out of them...

I think it was just a couple of posts ago that I was talking about wanting/not wanting to collect this old Helmar Seals and Coats of Arms set, and now here I am saying that I guess I'm gonna go for it. My Black Friday Mecklenburg will be the last single I get for a bit though. Collecting a 150-card set one piece at a time isn't very cost effective, so I'm gonna have to start keeping an eye out for a good lot on eBay. Having seen a few of those lots in the past, I know it'll be difficult to find one in my price/condition preference range, as most of the time the cards in these lots are pretty beat up.

Great card, terrible scan! After buying six 1966 Topps Superman cards at a show a few years ago, I've wanted to get three more just so I could have a page's worth. I'm trying to pick out the best 9 cards from the set to do this too, and #7 here is definitely one of the neater cards in the set. I know which two I want to complete the page with, it's just a matter of them showing up at a reasonable price. I can wait though.

This came out of my box from November that had two years worth of purchases in it. I think when I bought this I was still pretending like I'd ever have a chance to complete the '57 set, but have long since given up on that silly notion. Mack doesn't fit into any of my current collections, but I still love the image, so I'll find a place for him.

Rando Rheaume! I had never owned a single Goodwin Champions up until about a month ago, then I bought two during the Black Friday sales. Manon's base card has about 143 parallels in this set, but I only wanted this blue one, which by the way is the best one. That's a hill I'm willing to die on!

Crappy scan aside, this was one of my favorite cards gotten during this past Black Friday. Tippi doesn't have very many cards (most are parallels and ugly Leaf stickergraphs), but that's okay, I just needed one for a Alfred Hitchcock themed page that I've got going (technically I have two Hitch pages in progress though).

70's and 80's Topps stickers are always fun. I don't have any 80's for this post, but do have this...

... nifty trio of...

... 70's stickers to show off. Richard Kiel here is my favorite of the group. He's found a nice home on a Kolchak themed page.

It's always a good day when the great Christopher Lee is able to make an appearance on the blog. Despite it's awesome cast, I've never liked Gremlins 2. Try as I might, I just can't get down with it. As for the card, I already had a copy, but needed another one for a different project.

I've had a page dedicated to Harold Sakata (weightlifter/wrestler/actor) for a couple of years now, and always knew that this particular card (1966 Philadelphia James Bond) was going to be the center square. I think I bought this one well over a year ago now, I just had to wait until COMC got their act together to put him in his rightful place, thankfully, they finally have.

Last up for today is this kooky error(?). I found this a few months ago while searching through the recently added TCMA cards. I was looking for pro stuff, so when I hit a big block of minor league cards I just sped through them. Even in speed scroll, this card stood out from it's other minor league brethren. After looking around online, I can't find any copies of this card (there's a wrong entry on the TCDB), so I don't know if this was a funny printing error, or if every copy went out like this. 

It would've been cool if the back was screwy too, but alas, it's normal. If anyone has the skinny on this one, I'd love to know what's what.

Kind of a lazy post today, I know, but they can't all be winners. I guess too this'll be the last post on here for the year. I'm gonna spend a few days working on a post for the other blog (I've been experiencing all kinds of problems with that one), so if all goes well, I'll have a new post up on both blogs next week. Until then, be careful with those fireworks this weekend, it'd probably be a little more difficult to bang out blog posts with some missing digits. Oh, and take it easy on the booze too. If you thought it was hard typing with a few less fingers, just wait until you try to do so with a pair of non-corporeal hands.