Some photographs I've been meaning to post

I've given the reusable grocery bag full of cards from Rod a first pass, but still have another round or two of sorting before I snap pics of some highlights (lots of good stuff!), but in the meantime, here's a post of photos from the past couple months or so.

I know it's been a long time since Rod last dropped off cards on me.. because back in May he asked if I was going to be around one weekend to receive some cards, but sadly that was the weekend I was out at the coast for a family getaway. And it wasn't until just recently that Rod was finally able to swing by again, and so it was a glorious card-show-comes-to-me type extravaganza several months in the making. But anyways, back in May, I was a little upset with myself that I forgot to take my customary beach photo of my wallet card being dipped into the Pacific Ocean, but at least I grabbed this shot with the water in the background as we were starting the drive home.

Now here's some cute wildlife photography, mostly bunnies and my dog..

This bird spent a few minutes in my Mark Fidrych Memorial Bird Feeder recently, and seemed to really be giving a thoughtful look to the faded '77 Fidrych rookie that graces the feeder, and I had to try grabbing a photo.

I wore my Card Belt the other day, not to brag. :) They're all the rage, with a player wearing one during All-Star Game festivities or something. (Thanks again, Bob!)

The annual free concert in our neighborhood park was a good one this year, with local cover band Covered Structure performing for a solid turnout. I only caught a few songs during a dog walk, but they sounded great. Highlights included "elderly woman behind the counter in a small town" by Pearl Jam and the Fleetwood Mac favorite "Dreams".

Our neighbors across from our backyard aren't coming back, and so an estate sale was held at their house. I didn't go the first 2 days, but I stopped in on the last day. The final-day deal was $20 for whatever you could fit into a paper grocery bag. I got a nice bag full of stuff I can use. No cards/sports stuff, but some crafty stuff that I have cardart plans for. Also some other household stuff and yard stuff and a hanging shelf thing. I grabbed some tea and kitchen stuff, too, along with snapping this above pic. It was cool to see the inside of a house I see the outside of everyday (and to see my house from a new perspective). What's odd is we rarely saw the elderly couple who lived there. They seemed nice enough the rare times we noticed them about, but it must've been a seldom-used second home for them or something. I gotta admit it was nice having a mostly-empty neighboring house. Hopefully whoever moves in there next is cool and quiet. 

Speaking of old people dying, let's squeeze in at least one card photo before ending the post. Sad about Bob Newhart passing, but like I said recently about Willie Mays, I think he got the most out of life that one can get. Score the man a 10/10 in life fullness, right? A few years back (back at the old house) I was hankering a certified autograph of Bob the comedy legend, and ended up settling for this reasonably priced check cut-auto from Leaf with the intention of making a custom overlay for it, though I haven't gotten around to that yet, so here it is with a sparkly background to help it out instead for now. RIP, Mr. Newhart.

Welp, back to sorting the cards from Rod. Thanks for reading!

A Completed Page of Wallet Cards

I'll nearly always "like" any social media post that pops up in my feed with the #walletcard hashtag. I love to see meaningful cards out there playing an active part in someone's life. 

I still think of myself as "the wallet card guy", but nearly a decade on, I realize I'm probably alone there and most people today don't make the association anymore. Sure guys were putting cards in their wallets since the tobacco card days, with the most famous example being Bob Costas doing so with a certain Mickey Mantle, but for what it's worth, the "wallet card craze" wasn't a thing in the modern hobby until my post on January 2, 2015, which took off further thanks to attention on social media and was really buzzing for a hot minute there. I had made it into a contest those first two or three years, sending out heavy-hitting cards as prizes to the Junior Junkie and Bo Rosny, but I don't try assume any "authority" over the concept anymore. 

But yeah, I still keep a card in my wallet and am happy to see other people doing so, too. 

It's now been 9 years for me having an annual wallet card. You know what that means: Completed page!

Looks great, fuzzy corners and all!

Tony Gwynn's 1987 Fleer was my co-pilot for 2023, and while it didn't get into a ton of adventures, it does have the distinction of being my first international wallet card, accompanying my wife and I to Greece this past September. I'll go ahead and post some photo "outtakes" that weren't good enough to be included in my big Trip to Greece post recapping the vacation, but are fine for this walletcard-centric post:

lol, I was trying to center the card.

Good times!

As for 2024, welp, I'm back with a 10th wallet card. I decided to stick with Mr. Padre, why not.

What the heck, guess I'm going for a second page!

That'll do it for today.
Are you carrying a wallet card these days?

Trip to Greece

My wife and I went to Greece last month. My original "live journaling" draft of this post was really just a bunch of complaining leading up to the trip-- hey, I'm a homebody who doesn't like to leave the house if I can help it-- but it turned out to be a very nice vacation so I'm going to delete the intro bitching and just share some pictures I took. A few incoming baseball cards are at the end, too.

We made it to Athens after a super long day of traveling-- basically a "double stuff'd" day for us flying into tomorrow. We stayed in a small, but nice enough room in the city. Lots of honking during the day, but walking distance to historic Greek sites like the above pic.

After 3 days in Athens, we took a ferry over to the island of Naxos. This cat, the apparent reincarnation of Hitler, gave me an inauspicious greeting, violently regurgitating moments after this photo was taken. But overall, the feral kitties were cool and my wife tried to befriend them all. 

After I die of probably a heart attack in a few years, I totally expect her to promptly enter "crazy cat lady" territory. (Only reason we don't have a cat is I'm allergict [sic]).

Had really nice beach day in Naxos. Hell, I even popped off my shirt and ventured out a bit. (No sunburns for me for the trip, thankfully, though my wife did get a little too much sun one day.)

Gorgeous sunset viewing from the roof of our hotel in Naxos.

Naxos was my wife's favorite of our vacation's 3 or 4 legs. The only thing that ruined it for me was an annoying barking dog who lived across the way who did no favors to our already-wacked sleep schedule.

One day we took a bus tour up into the hills to check out some more sights. It was a hot one, nearly 90 degrees American. Got some awesome caramel ice cream in a small town, checked out an ancient olive oil pressing place, watched some pottery get made, hit another nice beach. Another highlight was seeing a couple donkeys hanging out. I mean, I know there are donkeys back in the states, but still..

Just a little off-center on the wallet card photo with this Naxos landmark known as Apollo Temple's entrance (Portara).

Of course I gotta do the traditional dipping-of-the-wallet-card in any body of water I encounter in my travels. Aegean Sea here.

After that we took another ferry over to Santorini, another Greek island.

Our place in Santorini had a personal hot tub in the back balcony. That was pretty swanky. Wallet card Tony didn't get dipped, but makes an appearance nonetheless.

Perhaps my favorite moment of the trip, I was just getting out after a soak, looking up at the skyline of illuminated church towers when all of a sudden everything flickered and went dark. Cool, surreal moment.

The power came back on after an hour or so. We had some downloaded Simpsons episodes on a iPad to help wait out the outage. Then later in the wee hours of the morning, my bad luck with neighbors disrupting peaceful sleep continued yet again, when the occupants of the room next door cranked up loud music for a while. groan.

My wife is more of the food photographer, occasionally snapping pics before we'd dig in, but the one food I photographed was this calzone I got for lunch one day. I'll keep fond memories in my heart for years to come of "the terrific calzoné I had back in the old country." Sure, that might be more of an Italian thing, but whatever. Had some nice baklava, too, and a little ouzo. Did I mention the winery tour in Santorini? That was a lot of fun. Chatted with some fellow American couples there via cruise. They had to rush back to the ship after the last stop, but lucky for us, our hotel was a 5 minute walk up the road so we were able to hang back and take our time.

Here's one last beach pic from when we were killing time on our last day in Santorini before a short flight back to Athens where we spent one last night in Greece in a weird airbnb type place (I was expecting a standard hotel room, but it was more like somebody's house who wasn't there) that only had one little trash can (in the bathroom)-- Oh yeah, one crazy thing about Greece is the plumbing isn't great so people don't flush their TP but rather throw it away. God bless the U.S.A!

Then the next morning we took a crazy taxi ride to the airport-- and btw, I'm really glad we didn't end up renting a car because the roads are often insane. Big old flight back to DC then a short layover and a big flight back to Portland. That must have literally been the longest day of my life, packing several hours onto the standard 24.

Now I've been home over a week and finally back to a decent sleep schedule. Honestly I'm fine not traveling again for the rest of my life other than the occasional trip to Hawaii (and we'll probably hit Canada at some point since I've got a passport now and it's not too far), but maybe my wife'll be able to talk me into another overseas vacation one of these years.

-  - --o

Now let's squeeze in some incoming cards.

I got a nice PWE from gcrl shortly before my trip that I wasn't able to mention yet. Here we've got some vintage set needs for me plus a pink mini Ryan Helsley RC which is of interest to me because...

it's a Christmas Card!

Great stuff.. thank you, my friend! I hope my return was sufficient. (I really need to build up my trade fodder).

-   - - --o

When I came home, I didn't have too much of a "mailhold mailday" bonanza to dive into, but I think I received a couple small eBay pickups and one box from Best Bubble Bob which was pretty neat.

Thanks to this lot of 1992 Leaf Black Gold, I've passed 75% complete with my parallel setbuild. I've never been much of a binder guy, but I might have to page up the set eventually. Damn near every card is a work of art in that black and gold frame.

Bob knows the Four G's to my heart/collection-- Gwynns, girls, glow-in-the-darks, and Gavins.

Even a miscut Pee-Wee card. I've ripped a lot of this 1988 set and can't recall seeing one so off center, making it a great addition to my "super OCD master set" of this product where any excuse to consider a card "unique" works.

Uncut magazine cards! Lots of good ones here. Tempted to cut this into separate cards.

Finally, a sealed San Diego Chicken board game from the early 80s. That'll kick my little PC of the legendary mascot up a notch!

If I had kids (or if there were cards in it), I'd be tempted to open it up and give it a go, but as it stands I'll plan to leave it in "collectable" condition.

pic from eBay

The star of the game are the little rubber chickens, which I had to find a picture of for curiosity's sake.

Thank you, Bob! I was already in your debt and now I'll really need to work up a respectable return soon.

That'll wrap up this long post. Thanks for reading!

Vacation Hold Mailday

My #walletcard for 2023-- an '87 Fleer Gwynn-- joined us for our latest family vacation to the Oregon coast for a long weekend. Weather in recent years for the near-annual trip has been mostly overcast and rainy, but not this year, as sunny skies got temps got up into the 90s. That made it nicer down on the beach, but overall it was a bit hotter weekend than ideal.

Anyways, I'm gonna make you scroll through a few of my best photos from the trip, then we'll check out some cool cards and stuff that was waiting for me back home in my held mail.

So yeah, it was a nice vacation overall, though our loveable asshole Ruby gave us a moment of panic when she ran off into town and was briefly "lost" before we tracked her down in a local shop with the help of folks pointing us in the right direction.

Onto the cool stuff that was building up for me at the post office back home while all that was going on.

A Puckett collector proposed a purchase on TCDB for a 2003 Retired base Kirby I had available. I don't like selling, though, and was able to instead work it into a small trade, throwing in 3 more '03 Retired base Twins for the guy netting me this beautiful OPC RC in return. That'll power-up the ol' Kirby PC!

I've been keeping an eye out for 2005 Pristine Legends more lately, slowly kinda thinking about building the refractor set (as if I don't already have enough tough refractor projects in-progress between ATFF, 2004 Chrome black, and Topps Retired autos!). I used to think these "The Legendary Years" cards were inserts in 2005 Topps Pristine until learning 2005 Topps Pristine Legends was a separate product. Scored this sweet Bo Jackson on eBay and the seller kindly tossed in a bonus Bo insert.

Bought my first Beckett magazine since the 90s. Couldn't resist the combo of Mr. Padre on the cover and blog bud Night Owl featured inside. Looking forward to reading through this soon.

Speaking of good dudes named Greg, I swung a trade with Gregory at Nine Pockets and landed some of his incredible exclusives. Quirky customs like this are right up my alley. Love shoehorning my favorite movies and TV shows into my card collection!

The WRIPP (Warhol Rose Infinite Parallels Project) has been a wonderful outlet for my creativity this year, whipping up a bunch of "1/1 parallels" for myself (and also to slowly send off into the world), and it warms my heart to get my first "outsider" additions to the project, with Gregory coming up with a Victorian wallpaper parallel, plus a clever "reverse negative" variation. I'm very happy he hopped on the WRIPP train and I hope more folks follow suit. He says to expect him to cover this WRIPP stuff in an upcoming Nine Pockets post, a blog with new posts published each Sunday like clockwork.

Gotta love the Sadaharu Oh stained glass card Gregory created! I had bought one from him on eBay, but it got some minor damage in transit that sadly detracted from its splendor. But I no longer have to slum it with a less-than-perfect specimen thanks to this replacement upgrade. Such a beautiful card! It's inspired me to add another collecting project to my docket: accumulate a bunch of stained glass type acetate cards, with the goal to end up with a whole "stained glass window" display of various cards. Wouldn't that be cool?!

Ok, that's all I got for now. Thanks for reading.