Deeply Distracted
Woof. I have severely neglected this spot. That’s not to say that there was a lack of reasons for doing so, but I let this space fall flat once again. We’ve been busy over here, after all. The Astros made it within outs of another championship – with plenty of mess along the way. They’ve done it again with yesterday’s announcement. Oh, and it was Halloween, so we had plenty of fall carnival things to do, and I’ve been in therapy twice a week for the shoulder (which is seeing good progress!) and we’ve contemplated putting our house on the market, and on and on and on.
I’ll spare you the gory details, but the small fixes we need to get done before we can put the house on the market would push us into holiday season, and that’s not really a time when you want to be dealing with showings, etc. What it has led to, however, is an extension of that deadline, per se, and so we’re putting some time in and cleaning things up, and so on.
That also means that I’m packing cards away for a temporary stay in storage soon, so I’ve been rushing some packages out the door as well. Packages out often mean packages in as well, so let’s talk about some cards that arrived, before I run off to tackle more projects. These first few come from Tony G. (AwgyDawgy at TCDB). I was able to find a good chunk of junk wax and some other cards to send his way, and picked up a handful in return.
Two of the cards Tony sent me were [team] set killers – an ’09 Goudey of Tejada, and this Carlos Lee from 2010 Opening Day. Nothing terribly exciting, but it’s always nice to cross more team sets off the list. Looking back at my poorly kept notes, I actually did a tremendous amount of that this year.
Those first three were all want list matches, but I cherry-picked these two to round out the trade. Tony made sure to warn me that Dusty wasn’t in tip-top shape, but that’s of little consequence to me. The minor league Finley was a real neat find on his trade list. I loved Steve, so it was an easy add.
I could have sworn that Erik J. (Jazzleader at TCDB) and I had traded before, but apparently this was our first swap. He filled out my Chrome parallels for the Astros prospects in 2019 Bowman, including these two studs that the club managed to hold onto at the deadline. Whitley will probably see big league time next season, and while Yordan looked mortal in the postseason (and tired), he was absolutely bonkers from the moment he came up. I think we’ll have another ROY in the team annals.
Erik had requested three of the “short prints” from this year’s Archives set. You know, those three 10-card subsets at the end of the checklist. The last of the five cards he sent my way also managed to kill off my team set. I had netted the ’93 Bregman in a separate trade a few days earlier, and this one brought the ’75 Ryan home to roost.
Alright, let’s squeeze one more swap in here. Jessi, a very nice Canadian trading pal of mine (MasterofPuppets at TCDB), and I put together what is at least our third swap of the year (hm, I need to blog those other ones). Headed my way were a handful of needs from this year’s Stadium Club set. One of the inserts I latched onto this year was the Warp Speed cards. The first couple that I pulled just sang to me. In the end, I don’t know that it’s a design I’m gaga over anymore, but I like it enough to go ahead and finish these out.* I’ve had the team set finished for a good while, but this Keuchel makes for just my second** black foil parallel, and hell, parallels are always welcome.
* I still need Acuña, Story, and Turner – I think. I might have the Turner.
** The other is Altuve, so send away if you have others.
The big score in my latest swap with Jessi, however, was another addition to the Astro-graphs collection! That’d be reliever Dean Deetz, who had a brief appearance with Houston in the end of 2018. He didn’t crack the roster this season, which is just a tad odd given the pitching craziness at times, but I expect we’ll see him again in 2020.
You won’t have to wait until 2020 to see me again, however. I’ll make it a point to stop by here more often.
