Christmas Catch-Up: Part 3

Today's card could've only come from one person, right?

I don't know which would be the bigger giveaway though, the fact that it's a 2003 Topps Retired Autograph, or it's Christmas-y overlay.

Obviously this came from our resident mad scientist, Gavin, whose creations have included both Baseball Card Breakdown, and 1991 MusiCards Blog.

I hadn't been expecting anything from Gavin, so just seeing an envelope from him was surprise enough, let alone what was inside! Given all of the other Gavin related posts that were popping up right around Christmas, I thought that said envelope might be related to those, but nope, it was Boog!

This is my second Boog autograph, and honestly, is by far the superior of the two (my other one is from 2012 Golden Age). It's also the first time that I've seen a Topps Retired card of any kind in person. Now that I have, it's not hard to see why Gavin likes them so much. I think too that I've only become aware of these cards because of Gavin, and I can't help but think that I'm not the only one.

As great as this card is, and as nice of a gift as it was, I'm afraid that I don't have a lot to say about it. I suspect that my fellow bloggers know all about that, I can say that it's cool as shit fifty times, but no matter how true it may be, that doesn't make for much of a post. I can say that it does look pretty neat in with my Boog pages, though the page that it's now on still needs to be filled out a bit.

Thanks again for the card, Gavin; it's arrival was undoubtedly the biggest surprise of this past holiday season.

*********************Bonus Content!************************

My mom and I did the same thing this Christmas as we did last year, where instead of buying presents, we just went halfsies on a Newspapers.com subscription (during Black Friday when they offer their lowest rates of the year). It's a good arrangement, that works out well for both of us. That being said, she did end up getting me one physical item, that being this book.

I had a Smithsonian book of some sort many (many) years ago, which wasn't very good. It was basically just pictures of items in the museum with a very brief two-line write-up under each one. Much more effort was put into this one, as there's plenty of meat (i.e. stories) behind the items being shown. It'll probably be a few months before I get to this book, but in the meantime, I took a bunch of pictures to give y'all a feel for what's inside:

I'm happy to say that I'm officially caught-up with all things Christmas. And I hadn't planned it this way, but these led right up to a bit of milestone for this blog, which will be the subject of the next post...