Quarantine Projects

Hello old friends!  Figured it was about time to do a post before my blog gets lost in the ether.  Hard to believe I retired the blog almost two years back. 

The retirement was not in vain as I continue to strive towards my goal of organization.  If you follow me on Twitter I've been posting periodic updates.  Quarantine has provided a unique opportunity to make a serious dent on a goal that at certain points seemed unattainable. 

Forever the elephant in the room was a crawl space full of cards that had been packed away after multiple moves.  With some prodding from my wife the project was tackled in early April.  It took a month of consolidating and moving but all the cards are finally in one place.  The task at hand now is tackling all those monster boxes and get the Pirates in binders and trade bait separated. 

Obviously the project had some fun moments.  As I was consolidating all these cards to the monster boxes my eyes locked onto a few unique finds. 

The only card that was kind of a surprise was the Kobe.  When I found a 500 count box of mid 90's, early 2000's basketball I took the time to go ahead and see what was in there.  When I was initially going through the box it seemed more likely that I would unearth an early Lebron James instead of Kobe, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a Topps rookie. 

Silver lining now is that I've started to send out packages again (4 last week!).  Many of the cards unearthed are from a time period in which many people weren't collecting (early 2000's) so it should make good trade bait. 

With the organization projects I haven't spent much time adding new cards to my collection.  I have a large amount ready to ship on COMC, but they seem to be running at a snails pace so I've let those sit.  I think I've only utilized eBay two or three times since the calendar switched to 2020. 

The biggest addition came via box break from the Card Papoy and Brian of HSCA.  I kind of thought we hit our high point when I pulled Kevin an Aaron Judge auto last year, but then he pulled me the above Ichiro.  Needless to say I was excited to get such a unique card.  I actually have it on a shelf next to my some of my higher end Pirate cards.  Box prices are so out of control now that Brian, Kevin and I put the brakes on our breaks.  Trying to workout a possible reverse box in the near future just to keep up our normal trade correspondence.

I have a fairly big collection of unopened boxes.  A lot of the junk wax era stuff was bought in the early 2000's at auctions and packed away in a Rubbermaid container in my crawl. The late 90's stuff was accumulated by rounding out purchases on Steel City over the years when buying boxes for our breaks.  Nice to have everything in one place now to have a better inventory.  Interesting to see the renewed interests in some of these sets.  I think many player collectors realize those insert sets from the 90's are much rarer than low numbered auto cards now.

Lots of loose packs too.  Many of these were courtesy of Wes as part of his 1056335645545 packages he sent my way over the years.  I often joke that I have a whole wing of my house devoted to items he sent my way.  As I continue to go through things that joke quickly turned to reality.  Wes has a heavy footprint in my collection. 

That is pretty much the full update collecting wise for me. My wife and I have cancelled any travel this year so we instead got a new porch on our house.  Helps make the stay-cation a little more relaxing and provided a little more quarantine square footage.  I try to fill downtime with Zoom happy hours with my out of town friends to stay in touch.  While not ideal it helps pass the time and have a social outlet.  Things are starting to open up again in my town, but with my daughters health history we have been avoiding most in person contact as much as possible. 

Hope everyone is doing well.  Big virtual cheers to all my old blogging pals.  Later