A Little of This, A Little of That

Wow. I meant to go on a bit of a posting spree after getting this place back in gear, and I certainly stalled out. I haven’t posted here in two weeks! It’s certainly not due to a lack of content on my end, either. There are a great many things to be blogged. Recovering from my shoulder injury has slowed me down a bit, for one. The wing is mostly usable now, at probably what amounts to 75% capacity. I can’t lift anything heavy or leverage any real weight, and certain range of motion issues keep cropping up, but I get to go to a therapist to start real rehabilitation next week.

Also, the car wreck has us down a car. I finally got word that my Fit was totaled, and while I’m thankful that my dad still had his old boat around (a 2005 Dodge Magnum) that I could borrow, it’s about time to go car shopping. I am not looking forward to it, but I will take your suggestions on midsize SUVs. Basically, I don’t really want anything larger than the CRV (we have one already) and I’d like to be prepared if we ever do have baby #2.

Of course, not having posted is not necessarily an indicator of me being quiet on the cardboard front, either. I took the ~8,000 cards that I got in from Nathan, sorted them into sets, and then set about unloading the biggest amount in the shortest amount of time. September saw me send out nearly 3,000 cards, and many came from that box. I’ve begun sorting the rest in earnest and logging it on my trade list in TCDB, but if you’re building any of the following sets, please send your list.
Topps: 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994
Donruss: 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993
Fleer: 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992
Score: 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992
Upper Deck: 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992

But enough about me, let’s talk about some cards. A while back (two-ish months ago?), I bought another repack at the Wal-Mart while in Galveston. It turned out to be not half bad, and had a delightful surprise inside. One of the packs was a little 2018 Chrome buddy, and halfway through the pack I uncovered this.

Why, what’s this? A Walker Buehler autograph redemption? Yes please!

It arrived about two weeks ago, and golly gee, just look at that! Sorry Dodgers fans, but I like this kid too much to put it up on the block. I streamed Buehler for a bit early in fantasy this season, and he’s been pretty darn enjoyable to watch.

That wasn’t all the fun in the repack, though it was the most significant thing. One of my packs turned out to be a 2013 Pinnacle – remember that stuff? Repacks sure do, although not on the level of 2013 Triple Play. At any rate, I pulled a swell acetate insert of Derek Jeter, which I offered up on Twitter – first dibs for Sooz, of course. (Hey, Sooz is back! Go read her blog!)

She wound up passing on it (she does have a lot of Jeters), but AJ of The Lost Collector jumped after it. I was happy to just pass that puppy on to someone who would really appreciate it, but AJ is rad and this turned into a quick one-for-one swap that netted me some more ink. He’d pulled this lovely Morgan Ensberg autograph, and I was very thrilled to bring it into the collection. I’ve been spoiled with some great third basemen here during my fandom with Caminiti and now Bregman. Morgan appeared to be the heir apparent to Cami, though, with some nice pop in his bat and one hell of a glove over at the hot corner.

This is turning into one of those gotta catch ’em all posts, and why not? This bad boy popped up in an eBay saved search. I don’t get too specific on my saved searches, unless it’s a specific autographed card for which I’m keeping watch. But I’ve had a “astros 1967” search in there for a while, mainly to see if any of the team set cards popped up. This made its way into the results because it is the image from Joe Morgan’s 1967 Dexter Press issue, only there was one small problem – it wasn’t a Dexter, but rather a sticker! That sent me on quite a scramble, until some collecting pals on Twitter chimed in to let me know it was a 1983 Starliner sticker! That makes this a completed team set as well! I nabbed this for under two bucks shipped, so it was quite an awesome addition to the collection.

Lastly, I hit a new shop back in August. Well, it is an old shop that was new to me. I’d heard through the grapevine that there was an old shop down in Alvin, which had been there for ages. I venture past that region often enough that I figured it was worth a short detour to stop by and see if there was any reason to put future detours on my agenda. Spoiler alert, there was not.

While the shop has been there for decades, the inventory has not. This guy keeps a pretty lean selection – several hobby boxes of new product, but not much of it, and a few monster boxes per sport on the tables featuring mostly $1 cards. There wasn’t a single card in there older than my brother (1990), much less older than me – and 95% of the stock was less than 5 years old, for certain. It’s probably even higher than that. But, I found a couple Astros to pick up, and I bought a couple boxes for storage, and I promptly removed the shop from my list. The Lowrie here is a 2015 Heritage chrome parallel, while Straw is a Holo parallel from this year’s Donruss. I almost snatched up a blue border version of this as well, but set it down. When I decided I’d get it, I went back through the box five minutes later only to find it had been snatched up in that short amount of time.

I did scoop up this bad boy from 2012 Heritage, however, as I’ve always liked MadBum, so I suppose that makes this trip a bit of a win. Yes, it’s true – this is a post that reveals my affinity for a Dodgers pitcher and a Giants pitcher. Nick V. will no doubt lament the black jersey in the picture here, but I couldn’t pass up this relic, which was also sitting in one of the dollar bins in the shop.

Alright, that’s all for the evening. Perhaps I’ll get to tune in briefly tomorrow night in order to find out if my Astros will be hosting Oakland or Tampa Bay when I head to the opening game of the ALDS on Friday. I like our chances this year – and my money’s on Oakland advancing out of the Wild Card game, so Fuji will be happy there.

2 Replies to “A Little of This, A Little of That”

  1. Yup. to black jerseys on Heritage and Ginter. Carwise I’m just going to chime in that once you go Subaru you never go back. This is both a recommendation (we love our Outback and the Crosstreks look pretty nice) and a warning.

  2. Most bloggers and Twitter people seem to absolutely loathe Bumgarner, so it’s nice to see someone say that they’re a fan of his. I don’t know what all the hate is about, but he’s one of the few modern guys that I enjoy watching. Hopefully he’ll end up going to a better team though, I’d like to see him get another ring or two.

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