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.

The deals keep coming

I've mentioned on here more than a few times that, while I do have a Twitter account, I spend very little time actually using the site. A couple of minutes (at best) a day is about all I can normally take, and as of late, I've been finding better uses for those couple of minutes each day; and just skipping the site entirely.

I'm not sure if this would be considered a "hot take" or not, but my biggest problem with the site is that I just don't find the majority of it's users to be all that interesting. And that's not to say that I am mind you, but at least I don't spend the entirety of my days tweeting out the same thing over and over, day after day. I don't know about anyone else, but it feels like every time I log in, I just see the same things being brought up, if not from the same people, then from the same types of people.

When it comes to card stuff, the repetition of topics is especially bad. Near as I can tell, there are basically four topics: A). How do you think this card will grade?/I'm unhappy with the grade that this card got! B). Something something... investment. C). Look at this latest mistake from Topps and/or Panini. And D). Something something... high prices/Something something... priced out of the hobby! 

The latter of those four talking points can be found with multiple variations, including the always extreme "Welp, I guess since I can't afford to collect what I like anymore, I might as well sell everything and find a new hobby... lots of teams and players available... DM for prices". I often wonder about these people, not for very long of course, but I am sometimes mildly curious to know what it is that they collect that they can't find any affordable pieces for. I mean if you collect literally any player/team/set, you can still find affordable base cards to add to the collection, things haven't got that bad. Seeing as how they are just another boring Twitter person, I never find myself caring enough to actually engage them in conversation, but it does give me pause for thought... at least until I scroll down a couple of more posts and happen upon on another person tweeting out the exact same thing!

I myself have had absolutely no trouble finding highly desired items at affordable prices in recent months. Heck, I haven't even had to "find" them, as they've been popping up almost daily in saved search emails. In fact my only real [first world] problem with collecting lately has been tying to decide which of these good deals to get now, and which to save to my eBay watchlist and hope that they're still available in couple of weeks time, when I can either, get my next paycheck, or sell some no longer wanted thing. Money is still terribly tight, but a couple of bucks here and couple of bucks there, is usually doable -- within reason. 

You've already seen a few of these much wanted cards in my last couple of posts, and I've got a few more here for today...

A few weeks ago I did something highly unusual and checked my email on the phone while eating lunch. I realize that this is probably a common action amongst pretty much everyone these days, but not for me, normally when I'm eating, I just eat, that's it. Anyways, back to my strange behavior that day. By checking at that time, I found myself there only minutes after having received that days round of saved search notifications from eBay. There were quite a few that day too, but two in particular caught my eye, and even more so after I saw that they were being offered by the same seller (COMBINED SHIPPING!!!). Oh, and the BIN prices on both were about half of the normal going rates, too!

Given it's oval shape, the the 1934 Carreras Film Stars set is one of the more unique tobacco sets to have been produced. It's also notable for containing a number of images that can't be found in other card sets, Mae West's offering being one of them. Despite having been a larger than life personality, the tobacco companies didn't do her any favors, as a lot of her cards from this era are terribly boring, and certainly weren't fitting for someone of her stature.

This card alone would've made my collecting day, but as mentioned, the seller had also just listed another one of my top wants from the set:

I always wonder how people go about pricing things, as Jean Harlow was a considerably bigger star than Mae West, and yet this card was only about half the price of Mae's. I'm not complaining of course, just curious how that works. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that less and less people are caring about such names with each passing year, or that Mae West's impact on current pop culture is more noticeable than Jean's, who knows? Either way, I got two cards that I really wanted for very little money (mUcH lEsS tHaN a BlAsTeR). 

Life goal: Find someone who looks at you like Jean's looking at Duke!

I needed a regular sized card for scale, so I just grabbed the top card from a stack, which just so happened to be this Pacific Legends Duke Snider. I didn't realize how well the pairing worked until I was cropping the scan. I don't think it would qualify as one of Bob Ross' "happy accidents", but in lieu of a better phrase, I'll just go with it.

Aside from the Sylvia Sidney that I already had, there are still a handful of cards from the '34 Carreras set that I would like to get. I have no problem waiting for them to show up at the right prices though, as it was certainly worth it for me to do so with these two.

Bonus content:

Since I was already gonna buy the two Carreras from this seller (they're called homeplatecards by the way), I figured I might as well see what else they had to offer.

I really don't want to start working on any more sets again, but there are two in particular that seem to be slowly chipping away at my resolve, one of which is the 1910 Helmar Seals of the United States and Coats of Arms of All Countries of the World set (or just the T107 set for card nerds). I like everything about this set, the images, the colors, the history, and heck, I'm even gaga for the backs -- which are all the same, but still...

This is only my second card from 150-card set, so I'm hoping that I can resist the urge to collect it, because otherwise I'd have an awful long way to go towards it's completion.

At the rate things are currently going, I could be doing these kind of posts for the foreseeable future (I won't though, I think you all deserve a break from the non-sports posts). Strange Twitter people may not be able to find anything reasonably priced to collect at the moment, but I'm currently dealing with quite the opposite problem. Unlike those folks though, I will not be selling off my entire collection to escape it. Being inundated with deals is a good problem to have, and I don't see myself growing tired of it anytime soon.