Before and After.

       I have a menial part time job.  How menial? I refuse to even tell you what it is.  The good thing about this job is that I can do it with no thought or function, it is 2 miles from my house, and they pay me straight cash (attention NSA and IRS, no, they don't).  It also helps fill in the time when "real" work isn't available and keeps me out of trouble.  Well, at this particular workplace, one guy got fired and another just up and quit leaving them very short handed and since I am a little underemployed otherwise, I told them I could fill in until they found someone.  This was my first mistake.  My "part time" job has taken up 48 hours each of the last two weeks and this is a job where I am on my feet 8-12 hours at a time.  Needless to say, it has left my old body very tired and left me very little time for my favorite hobby (thus the lack of updates lately - at least I have a decent excuse for a change...).  In fact, it has left me with little time to do anything with all my incoming cards except this:

Yup, I have just been throwing them in a random pile on the floor.  So sad.  I was on a listia and ebay buying kick the last couple weeks to boot, so this pile got very large and unruly very quickly.  Lucky for me, I had a nice quiet evening tonight, leaving me with a good block of time to tidy this all up.  Let's see what happened, shall we?

A few months ago, I threatened to make a page of the 2013 Opening Day Blue Shiny parallels:

This page is the fruits of what became quite a labor.  I went on ebay and bought two lots of these, figuring I could make a page and use the rest as listia and/or trade bait.  One of the lots came right away, the other did not.  I got an email from the seller saying they got returned to him by the post office and refunded my money.  I have my suspicions he didn't like the price he got for his lot, god I hate that...but oh well, I then bought another little lot and finished off this page.  It's got a good balance of teams and players and a good contrast of photos.  I like it and the scan doesn't do it justice, it is not just shiny, it is SHINY!!!

Speaking of shiny, I also bought a lot of these on a whim:

I wasn't even sure what they were, but I got them because the lot had a couple of Mets in it.  Then I read up and found out they were hobby shop redemption cards.  I have no doubt all those fine honest shop owners didn't open the packs and put them online for sale.  Nooooooo.....that would never happen.  Anyway, I can't decide if I like the design of them or not.  They have a bit of a Lichtenstein thing going on, but there is also a lot of odd negative space.  I cannot deny, though, that they are quite shiny.  And lord knows I have some Spring Fever because my team is not in the playoffs again for the seventh year in a row.  I am rooting for a Dodgers/Red Sox World Series if anyone cares and honestly, I am not sure I even do. 

One of my many odd Listia buys was a batch of Andres Galarraga cards:

I was at the time looking for oddball Post cards, but I ran across this lot of 10 Galarraga cards.  I didn't have a page of Big Cat cards because he always played for teams I didn't care for and he flamed out late in his career as a Mets Spring Training signee (one of many with that distinction).  But I guess time heals all wounds and for the equivalent of a dime, I added this page to my retired books.

Next is a page I am happy to add to my binders:

These are 1995 Topps Premier Hockey Special Effects cards.  Sadly, they did not scan as well as I wanted them too, but they are quite shimmery and shiny.  The "special effect" is a sheen of shininess that looks like skated-on ice and believe me, it looks quite nifty.  I learned of the existence of these cards a couple weeks ago when I wrote up this post about shiny football cards.  I was so excited to learn they existed, I went on ebay and got a big lot of them from Canada.  I even decided to let a Rangers player creep in there, a team I do not usually let onto my pages.  But I look at it as, the Rangers winning the cup was so rare and unusual I might as well throw them a bone.

One last batch of listia lot hijinx:

I was looking for Drew Brees cards and came across this insert set from this year's Topps football flagship.  They are based on those very cheesy inserts they put in rack-packs back in the late 80's and early 90's.  I thought they were die cut to have rounded corners to be all modern and classy, but it turns out that is just a trick of the light.  The seller also mailed these in a plain white envelope with no protection whatsoever. By some bit of dark magic, they made it through the postal system unscathed.  Listia is such a crapshoot; maybe that's why I like it so much...I need a little more excitement in my life.

There were so many odd cards in that pile that will eventually show up on the blog, but here is one I am not sure will ever get a chance to be featured otherwise:

I really like this insert set.  I have a few of them in my collection and if I was really feeling frisky, I could buy the 10-card set and make a page.  But right now, I am content to own the Griffey in all its teal colored jersey see thru glory.  It's even better that I grabbed it on listia for a faux fifty cents.

One last thing you may have noticed in the lower right of the pile:

My menial job does let me talk to people and we have many many regular customers.  One of them I have known for a long time and he is a real character.  He repairs pin set up machines for local bowling alleys.  This is a very specific skill and judging by this gentleman, it obviously requires eccentricity.  Anyway, he noticed I had been working everyday for 2 weeks straight rather than my usual 2-3 days a week and we got to talking.  He asked me "well, what do you do when you aren't here" and I told him my vocation and I told him I was also a writer.  "Well, what do you write about?"  I told him about my failed life as a novelist and I told him I have a blog.  "What is your blog about?"  Now, people usually ask these question about writing to be polite.  My usual answer about my blog "baseball cards" immediately makes 99% of people change the subject as they have either no interest, understanding, or patience for such things.  Not this time.  His face lit up and he said "Really?  I used to collect back in the day..."  And off we went on a 20 minute rapid-fire conversation about baseball, baseball cards, and collecting in general.  We talked about favorite players and teams and the like. What we have, used to have, going to shows, selling at shows, that I used to work at a card shop etc.  This doesn't happen to me very often outside of a card show, so it was quite a pleasant little moment.  Later in the day, the dude comes back and hands me this little pile of stuff and says "I don't collect much anymore and I thought you would like these more than I would."  I mean, look at those cards.  These aren't junk, this is a Piazza rookie card, two rare Piazza parallels, and a couple of nice 1970's vintage cards (of course, I will have to bust them out of those screwdown prisons).  I can be quite the curmudgeon when it comes to talking to people at work, especially when I am tired but in this one time, it seems hard work and being personable was more than its own reward.