Actually, what I've got is a nasty case of allergies. It hit me pretty hard last night and I spent most of the night tossing and turning because my head hurt and I couldn't breathe. This morning I felt terrible and I stayed home from work so I could try to recover a little bit. I still hurt all over and my head is a bit fuzzy, but I should be okay unless I do something stupid like mow the lawn. The main thing for me is that my face doesn't itch and my nose isn't running.
I visited my LCS a couple of weekends ago and bought some Topps Heritage that also came with a couple packs of Spring Fever promotional cards. I liked them so much that I went out and found a cheap set on eBay. I can't see myself buying enough packs to complete the 50-card set on my own, so this felt like a pretty good buy at 50 cents per card.
The set features some nice bright colors and a refractory sheen. The checklist is made up of the usual cast of big stars and young guys with some hype behind them. I think that with the little palm trees in the foreground, the players on the cards look like giants from some monster movie like Godzilla or King Kong.
I've been slowly working on getting my card collection sorted and entered into Zistle. It is quite a project, but I have done a pretty good job of adding all newly-acquired cards into the database as they come in. One big project I tackled was to get all* of my Hakeem Olajuwon cards entered into the system. I was kind of surprised at how many cards of his I didn't have. I guess I'll have to work on that. One of the hardest things about getting the cards listed was trying to find out what exactly they were. There were so many sets put out in the late 90s that I had some trouble finding out what some of my cards were.
*I know there are stragglers, but I got the vast majority of them entered in.
I've also had a pretty steady stream of trades/trade requests going on in Zistle. Unfortunately I have become a little overzealous in the trading department, sending away cards that I don't have duplicates of, so instead of filling empty spots in my sets I am just moving an empty slot from one place in my collection to another. Oh well, I will just have to pull the cards before I finalize my trades from now on. But for the most part I have been able to turn a lot of doubles into new cards for my collection.
I have also been trying to move some cards here and there on eBay, to turn cards I don't necessarily want into cash that can be used for cards I do want and/or shipping money for trades. That has gone pretty well. Some cards sell for a lot more than I expect and some cards undersell, but it all tends to even out.
Another exciting thing going on in my life right now is Fantasy Baseball! I don't get to watch a lot of sports on television, so I tend to focus heavily on my fantasy teams. I even got into a Fantasy Bloggers' league this year, which is pretty cool. It is my first keeper league, so that has been a bit of an experience. In keeper leagues you keep a certain number of players from last year's roster over into this year rather than drafting an entirely new team every year. The hockey and basketball seasons are just wrapping up, too, so I have a big pile of fantasy rosters to track and adjust right now.
There is also a fantasy baseball thing going on over at Tribecards, where the big annual card giveaway extravaganza is going on. I don't even know how to describe it fully. Every manager started out with a list of players they like. Tribecards ran a simulated draft and allocated players to each manager. He opens a buttload of packs throughout the season and any cards of your players get sent to you at the end of the year, or whenever he gets around to it. Any unclaimed players that come out of the packs get picked up in a supplemental draft each week, and then any players that manage to get unclaimed repeatedly are randomly added to managers' stacks.
And if that wasn't enough, he also managed to find a roster management game that allows him to simulate a baseball season for everyone in the group, using players that they have drafted. It's like a big baseball nerd nirvana. I won my opener last night against a team from Utah. Beating a Utah team makes opening day especially sweet for me, as I hate Utah's lone pro team, the Jazz. I actively hate very few teams, but the Jazz are right up there at the top of my list. Even though my blog feed updates with some reliability, I find myself going over to Tribecards a couple times a day to make sure I didn't miss anything.
And that's about it for this post. Spring Fever is a pretty nice set, although I wouldn't want to try to put it all together by buying boxes of cards at the card shop to obtain packs. I do feel a little bad buying a set online, because it is likely that a card dealer out there didn't make the packs available to customers, and instead just busted all of their packs to blow sets out the door and farm any high-dollar autographs they might pull. I guess that's how these things work.
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