Ephrata Is Not Fancy

Made it up to the Ephrata show again this year.  Since the Dulles Expo Center has been sold, the 3-per-year Chantilly show isn't happening until the fall when their new mall building renovation is complete.  So this may be the biggest show I get to for a while.  Ephrata is halfway between Lancaster and Reading and is still an hour and a half from the new Hivemind HQ, even though I'm farther north.

The show is largely vintage cards, which is more of a rarity these days.  I concentrated on my two 60's set builds, but still got a few other player collection things and some stuff for Angela too.

They always have one signer - this year was Penn State star Lavar Arrington.  I might have had him autograph something Redskins, but passed.  I still haven't really seen where they do the signing in the building.  It's not near the show floor.

On to the loot.  Found a couple more Jordan Addisons for my PC.  The Vikings picked up his fifth year option. 

Mahomes was one of the last two inserts I need for 2019 Score completion.  (The other is the Josh Allen Signal Callers.)  Brady is a promo for the 2005 Throwback set.  Been looking for that for a while.  Figured I better grab it even though it was five bucks.  His stuff will probably only get worse that way. 

Some interesting additions to my baseball PCs.  The Sutter was the first parallel for his 2021 Chrome Platinum Anniversaries.  The other three were the only things I got from my usual insert guy, who lives near the show but I've seen him just about everywhere else but there.  He only had the current year Heritage, flagship, and Bowman.

Was hoping to find a few obscure Phillies issues of Puddin' Head Jones, but only found this playing card.  Bake is from the 1978 SSPC set, which I still need a lot of my other PC guys from.

The fancy parallel Brett Favre from the top is here with the rest of his that I got for quarters or dollars for Angela.  We just got a 230 count trade of all Bretts this past week, (thanks Jake Gepner from TCDB) so his numbers are soaring.  Had to put him in his own 3" binder already.

The Manning brothers made a brief appearance in those same boxes.  I'm still educating Angela on the distinctions between refractors and x-fractors etc.  She does like shiny.

On to my vintage builds.  Struck three of the checklist variations for 1961 Topps.  The first two have differences on the back, and the third is Aparicio's name as highlighted in red.

I had just traded for a 4th series checklist as well, but unfortunately, neither one of them will likely be the final resident of my set.  

The one I got at the show turned out to have creases on the top corners.... 

And the one I traded for had been marked and erased.  The previous owner had alerted me to this ahead of time.  If anyone wants one for their collection, let me know.

Moving to 1963, these are all high number short prints.  Felt good to find most of these for half or less of the typical $15 price tag without being in lousy condition.

The rookies are the variations with either '62 or '63 up top.  I have the other flavors already.  Maris looks so sad, I'm not sure why.  Herzog and McDaniel were a couple of the low series I hadn't found good copies of until now.

And finally, I got a bargain on Roberto, and the only catch is the small crease through the top of his hat, and a pencil mark in the upper part of the inset circle that rubbed off pretty decently.  I'll take it for two digits instead of three. 

And that wraps up my show haul.  Not sure when the next show will be, but it will probably be one of those where half the tables have Pokémon, which is fine.  See you then!

Card Room Migration: Phase 4 - Operations Restored

Card Room is in full operation ~ which means I'm occupied with trades and putting things away rather than posting.

Here are some shots (taken at night, so ignore the bad lighting) of the space as it is currently.  I managed to make room on the shelves for binders and in the cabinets and racks for sets and other boxes.

Angela's collection in progress among my stacks to put away.  There's still a bit of clutter in the room because I'm still finding the balance between having a spot for everything, but keeping things in reach.

This is where the blog magic happens now.  Every once in a while, anyway.

And this is where the trading happens.  I draw from the middle shelves on either side for baseball or football.  The second screen in the middle makes it easier to see what to pull.  It's a little strange to have part of my collection side by side with my tradeable stuff, but function before fashion, I guess.

The Baseball shelf has some space.  Vintage sets keep pushing everything forward. 

The football (/hockey/misc) shelf has a whole empty level at the bottom.

Baseball cabinet is still pretty populated with sets in progress.  And my player collection binders aren't getting any thinner for sure.

Top of the football cabinet is still a work in progress.  There is space in the bottom of both for more big sets. (Forgot to open them for the photos).  I moved a lot of the junk wax, etc. that don't get touched often into the closet in the room.  I'm still making that more organized and experimenting with storage methods.  I won't show you that part.

That's all for now.  See you out on the database, or in the comments of several blogs.

I will be retiring from the school system soon - earlier than I thought - but that should give me more time to keep the posts coming more regularly.  Stay tuned! 

Turning The Page

Back in mid-January, I posted that I found a bargain for UltraPro 9 pocket pages from Noble Knight Games.  These 125 count boxes of "hologram pages" were $20 compared to the $26 that Amazon offers for 100 Platinum pages.

Let's see how the two compare:

They have a similar hologram label on the spine.

The new page is on the left, and a Platinum page is on the right.  They both feel pretty close to the same weight, and I can't tell a big difference in the construction.

The Platinum pages do say so below the holograms. 

The holograms are different, but I feel like either one is suitable for my stuff.

I'll let you know more once I start using them heavily, but I would get them again so far.

On a side note, if anyone has any spare UltraPro binders in these two colors, I'd be willing to swap you for some plain ones, or "view" binders with the clear covers that you can put cards and papers down inside. 

Looking for gray or the rusty burgundy color.  I have the different decades color coded for my set binders.  Would like to keep it consistent, though I won't be getting all the 50's sets any time soon.  (Only have two more 60's sets to go for all 10).

 

This Is Why We Mark 'Em Non-Machinable

Made a trade last week with TCDB user tntcardsstg (Trevor from Bump And Run Football blog) for 25 cards.  20 of them were for Angela - mostly Eli Manning, a Brett Favre and a John Riggins.

I get the daily USPS emails that show what mail is coming that day.  There was a picture of the mailpiece there, but it didn't appear in my mailbox.  But the postal gal (I could tell by the handwriting) said contact them to verify that it was mine.  It looked like this:

It probably was marked "non-machinable", but we all know they try to put it through anyway.  This one lost so much of the envelope that there was no destination or return address left at all.  I'm guessing it just arrived stacked between the other couple trades I got that day.

Here's the envelope, or what was left of it.

Luckily, the cards were fine.  I showed the gal at the post office the TCDB trade page when I went to pick them up.  It was the perfect way to verify where they were supposed to go.  I should have said that any stray packages of cards are probably mine, but who knows?

Thanks Trevor!  Looking forward to the next round!

I don't blame him for anything.   This just happens now and then.  Glad they made it OK.

Night Owl Knows Rock'n'Roll

Well, I'm back into trading on TCDB, and pretty heavily at that.  I posted that I had passed the milestone of my 500th trade on there, and got over a dozen new offers in the same week!.  At one point I had 21 active trades going and a handful of offers pending behind them.  

Plus, I got most of my collection back into the proper places - cabinets, shelves, closet, etc.  There will be another post on the card room soon.

So among all that, I've blown like three weeks between posts here.  I've got a couple ideas for posts after this one, so hopefully I don't forget them before I get 'em up.

Meanwhile, I had the images from this mailday ready to go, so that's what you're getting today.

Night Owl sent me this one that I kinda gushed over for my player collection:

It's the Archives black parallel.  I probably would have a hard time finding this one in the wild.

The rest of the package threw me off for a while.  I thought he had tossed in some random RockCards, which I had already completed a while ago.

I was like, "that's nice, but I have all those."

But then I turned them over....

They were all consecutively numbered, and had a 1990 copyright date.

There was a Megadeth sticker too, shown here with the last card in the set.

When I compared it to the sticker I already had, it was different in that it had the band name across the bottom.

The one in the regular set does not.

I looked them up on the database, and these are the complete set of promo cards for the Brockum RockCards.

Whoa!  Thanks Night Owl!

Here are the rest of them - Mötley Crüe and Aerosmith

Rock on collectors!