I don't know how my fellow bloggers feel about it, but inquiring about the availability of a card, or cards, seen in the post of another, has always seemed like an odd, and uncomfortable, practice to me.
I know that for some it's completely normal, and considered to be accepted, but for me, it feels almost like bad manners in a way. Of course I have weird anxiety issues, so that might be coloring my opinion. If so, I guess I'm biased, a biased blogger, that's a novel concept.
Although I do think that there are exceptions to this, especially if someone makes a point of it to mention that they don't want, or don't plan on keeping, what ever's being shown. I myself do this on a fairly regular basis, and do so specifically just to ease any awkwardness that someone might feel about wanting something that they're seeing.
Thinking back over the years, I can only remember a handful of times where I've felt comfortable enough to ask about something's availability, most of which have come in just the last year or so, and all were on things that were supposedly not wanted by whoever was blogging about them. Such was the case earlier this year when, Kevin, aka The Diamond King, posted about a big ol' box (or was it two?) of basketball cards that he had acquired. Many neat cards in said post, which is sort of expected when talking about the contents from at least one monster box, but nevertheless, lots of good stuff was featured, as well as the usual associated memories (a must for any good blog post). It was also mentioned, by Kevin of course, that not all of the that posts contents, nor all of the contents from the box, were going to be keepers, so given what was being shown, and knowing that there was gonna have to be some interest from other people... I went ahead and inquired about their availability!
After heaping truck fulls of praise upon Kevin in Tuesdays post, as well as saying that today's post was going to be pt. 2 of the generosity that I've received from him in recent months, so you can probably tell where this story is going, but just in case...
You still with me? If so, how's that for a cross-sample? I tried to get as many different cards in as possible, but still ended up leaving out quite a few.
After a few emails were exchanged, and not very much time elapsed, a box arrived, and not just any box, no, this box that was made up almost entirely of 90's basketball inserts, with a few parallels thrown in for good measure (a few early 2000's things as well).
I knew that something was coming, but certainly wasn't expecting this! I know that I took a picture of the cards in the box when they arrived, but can't seem to find it now, otherwise I'd of led off the post with it, but suffice to say, there was probably 300, maybe 400, cards in this box. And I'm not gonna lie, I was a bit overwhelmed, so much so that I briefly looked through everything, and then set them aside for longer than I should have (I was also still trying to finish off my year+ long sort at the time as well, and didn't want to add to the work that still needed to be done).
I came back to them after the big sort was finally finished, and was completely blown away again -- goldfish memory. I'd say that a good 60-70% of the box was new to me, and was of mostly players that I collect, so one really couldn't ask for too much more.
Given how many cards there were, I knew that I couldn't show them all, and I certainly didn't want to scan them all, but I knew that I had to try and at least scan decent chunk of them, as wouldn't be very respectful to at least try and show a large percentage of them, so prepare to have your senses assaulted by some serious 90's insert action.
Two more quick notes though: 1). Did you see that Shawn Kemp at the top of the post? Yeah, that was in here too. So if you're keeping count, going back to the last post, that's eight that Kevin has sent! And 2). I've already been a bit wordy up to this point, so from here to the epilogue, I'll just let cards do the talking...
I haven't been to a card show this year, which does kind of suck, but when you get a box like this, it sure makes up for it, as I could only hope to find so many of these at just one show.
A thousand thanks again to, Kevin, for this act of crazy generosity! And for those that saw the last post, his patience once again is greatly appreciated as well, as I still haven't sent anything in return for these 😟.
Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.
P.S. Blogger automatically switched me to the new format this morning (Thursday), and while I could still revert back to the legacy mode, I decided to give the "new" Blogger another try. It appears that a number of changes have been made since the last time that I tried it a few weeks ago, and is now considerably easier to use, so I ended up doing this whole post in the new mode, with absolutely no problems to boot. I guess all of our collective bitching... err... helpful suggestions, has paid off. Yay us!
