I am a filthy liar

Last Friday's post saw me letting everyone know that, save for an upcoming Free Stuff Friday, I would be taking the rest of the month off from blogging, and now less than one week later, here I am... blogging again!

What I can I say? After just six days I'm already missing everyone. It's funny, I've gone weeks between posts before, which have always been unplanned, and had no problems -- but apparently I'm not very good at taking planned breaks, because I was itching to come back within just a couple of days of what I thought was a much needed respite.

I've got much to say after the last six days (see below), all of which could've waited until April, but given what were all currently dealing with, the want to interact with the closest thing to real friends that I have has been strong, stronger than usual, so hopefully me lying about not posting again until next month will be forgiven.

Besides wanting (needing?) to keep in touch with all of you, another thing has brought me back early, namely a PWE that I received this past Monday. I mentioned in the last post that I've been fortunate enough to have received a number of packages/PWE's already this year, so getting another one isn't exactly out of the ordinary (feels weird to type that), except it was, if only because I have no idea who sent it?

There was no return address, no note, and I don't recognize the hand that was used to write out my address on the envelope. There wasn't even a postmark, just a faint, but smeared cancel.

In 4½ years of blogging I've never received a mystery parcel, and while it was kind of fun, I would rather know who it is, if only so that I could properly thank them. Whoever sent it, obviously knows of my interests though, as I do like me some horror, and still think the world of holograms.

There were two cards in the PWE, both from Impel's semi-forgotten 1991 A Nightmare on Elm Street set. Early holograms don't always scan the best, these being no exception, so here's a slightly better look at this one...

Much better! If memory serves (which it's doing less and less of these days), there were only two holograms in this set, and I've never owned either before, so if I were to say that finally getting one was pretty neat, how the heck am I supposed to describe getting two?

I couldn't get a decent scan of old #H2 here to save my life, so hopefully this will suffice.

I am very grateful to whoever thought enough of me to send these, hyperbole aside, they may have been the very last thing that I expected to see fall out of this envelope, so thank you for the very pleasant surprise. But seriously though, please reveal your identity, if only so that everyone else can know how awesome you are!

Moving on...

I mentioned the planned Free Stuff Friday, which I thought about trying to do tomorrow, but I don't have anything scanned, and will be busy most of today, so I'll just go ahead and do it next week -- until then, this picture will serve as a small preview of what's coming! I realize too that some folks are getting a bit hinky about receiving mail, so if that's you, please don't hesitate to participate next week, as I'll be more than happy to hold your claims until you're comfortable receiving parcels again. As an aside, I normally get my posts out around 11am CST, but I'm thinking about pushing the Fee Stuff posts back to 5pm-ish, and am curious to know if that's any better, or worse, for the folks who like to participate?

I've made more headway with my great card sort this past week as well. Baseball is finished, football is at about 80% done, and basketball, well, I don't have a percentage for basketball, but for all intensive purposes it's basically done, I just need to finish grouping some of the like-minded stuff together. I might actually do a short recap, with plenty of photos, about all of this next week, it'll probably won't be too terribly exciting, but a few people might enjoy it.

All of this sorting has inspired the creation of even MORE player collections, all of which I'm hoping to catalog at some point, with that in mind, I turned my attentions to my loose pack stash a couple of days ago, as it would be nice to know if any of said packs contain cards for said player collections.

Save for six packs from September's card show that I forgot to add to the stack before photographing, this was my stash of loose packs, I say was because they've all been opened since this photo was taken, and all but a couple of stinker packs will eventually make their way onto the blog. It's funny too, because unlike a lot of people, I never intended to have a stash of any kind, I just bought a few packs, never got around to opening them, then rinse and repeat... and two years later I had a mini-stash!

Speaking of stashes...

Not quite as impressive as the boxes shown off by Fuji and Ryan a couple of weeks ago, but this (pay no attention to the TV Guide's) is my unintentional box stash, plus the two 1993-94 Topps rack packs that I bought right before everything went bonkers. These are all gonna have to be opened up sooner than later too, especially the football, because those will definitely have some player collection guy's in them. The 1990-91 Fleer basketball boxes seem to be going up in price for some reason, I bought my two for $7, which seemed a bit overpriced, from the guy at the "copy/print/card" shop in town maybe a year ago (everything else except for the 1997 Zenith came from there too BTW), and when I was just in there a few weeks ago, I saw that he now has them for $25 a box! Seeing his new price made me check eBay when I got home that day, and believe it or not they seem to now be selling in the $20-25 range -- I just don't understand why? There is nothing rare to be found in these boxes, there are literally millions of copies of each card in this set still floating around... I sure hope this surge in price isn't because everyone started (re)discovering just how awesome my beloved Shawn Kemp rookie is!

I was going to close this post with some thoughts on all of this virus business, but I suspect a lot of people are reading the blogs to try and get away from what's going on out there right now, so I will skip doing so for the time being. I will say though - and this is card related, so it might apply to a few people - that if you're like me at all, and rely heavily on the credit earned from doing COMC's Challenges to augment to your collecting budget, you might want to start getting used to the idea of them being closed for a while. Their recent emails indicated that processing of submissions has been slowed, and could very soon be halted, which would mean no more Challenges, so you might want to get to doing them while you still can, and if you have some credit built up in your account, it might be a good idea not to spend all in one place. They also asked that people not request any shipments for the time being, so depending on how long that's in effect, there's a good chance that we won't be seeing a Spring Cleaning sale this year.

On a much lighter note, I've been selling some more stuff on eBay as of late, and it was through one of these recent sales that I met, Dan, from 1978toppsfootball.com. Not only is Dan apparently a preeminent expert when it comes to the 1978 Topps football set, he's also really into buybacks, so much so in fact, that I think that he could be called the new king of buybacks, I mean dude's only six cards away from completing the '87 Topps baseball set... in buyback form! The site is still a work in progress, but if you're looking for something to do, you might want to head on over and check it out sometime (there are tons of pictures).

And finally, on a very positive note, Tim has decided to start smelling the cardboard again. This was a most excellent surprise, as even though his blog isn't that much older than mine, it was still amongst the earliest blogs that I read once I found out that there was such a thing as card blogs. So if you haven't already done so, go say hi, or welcome back, or something, as long absent bloggers returning to the fold is always cause for celebration!

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

Can you help identify these signatures?

My mom bought me a couple of signed baseball's at a thrift store a couple of weeks ago. According to her, they were priced so low, that they were practically free -- so even though she knows that autographed memorabilia isn't something that I normally collect -- she went ahead and bought them anyway.

So now I have a pair of signed balls (tee-hee), which is what it is, but there is one slight problem... I can't identify/read the signatures! So, this is me asking for some assistance in doing so.

 The first signature is clearly Juan somebody, but after that... I got nothing.

 This should narrow it down a bit.

 I can't imagine that the model number will help it all, but you never know.

And the second ball:

I have a pretty good guess as to what this one says, but I don't want to influence anyone else's opinion by revealing it... especially if I'm wrong. This was a much used ball, so much so, that all the other markings have been worn off. Since it was with the other one, it may be another Florida State League ball, but then again, who really knows.

I'm not expecting too much here, but any help would be greatly appreciated.


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To open, or not to open...

In my second to last post, I mentioned having an amazing outing at a semi-local antique mall. Many posts will be coming very soon to try and cover all the purchases from that trip, but in the meantime, one of the items is causing a bit of a conundrum.

While perusing one of the booths, I noticed on a lower shelf, two small plastic containers full of unopened packs. To my knowledge, these were new to this booth, so I was most curious to see what was to be had.

The first container ended up being bust, the prices were crazy high and the selection stunk. For example (yet another time I should have taken a picture), there was a pack of 1994 Collect-A-Card Power Rangers for $4... Yes, your read that right, four bucks for one pack! On a good day, you could probably buy four complete sets for that price.

So as you can probably imagine, I wasn't expecting too much once I moved on to the second container. And was pretty much the same story, at least until I got towards the end of the selection, which is when I came across this:

Upon first sight, I was stumped, as I had never seen a pack of whatever it was before. Due to the graphics and the type of foil wrapper, I didn't have to turn it over to realize that it was a product of the 90's, which perplexed me even more as I am pretty familiar with all things 90's basketball. Looking a little more carefully at the front, especially the multiple different company logos, I was able to deduce that it was some sort of repack... A repack unlike any other repack that I have ever seen before.

Turning it over:

The back didn't really reveal anything new. Googling "Treat Entertainment, Inc." only took me to a website with a list of expired copyright's. Searching for the pack name along with the year yielded bupkis as well. So according to the internet, either this pack doesn't exist, or if it does, there are none available anywhere else. My personal opinion at this point, is that this might have been a regionally issued repack, since I'm only one state above Alabama, it would make sense that if I'm right, they might have been available here at one time.

So the question now is, should I open it? I'm not a collector of unopened packs/boxes, but I can also appreciate that this is somewhat of a unique item, and I would really hate to open something that might be the last (hyperbole?) of it's kind. The guaranteed one Topps Finest card per pack that is mentioned on the front and back of the wrapper is most likely a Jolly Green Giant by now, and the front card that has had the MJ Metal Collector Coin (oooooh!) pushing and rubbing against it for the last twenty years, is probably in less than ideal condition by now.

I'm sure most folks will be leaning towards the tear it open side, but isn't there something to be said for leaving it as is? Well?


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