Rainbow in the Dark 19: R.A. Dickey Blank and Silver

These rainbow things can get a bit addictive, and I think I may have gotten a bit ambitious in trying to work on 2014 Bowman rainbows for three players in R.A. Dickey, Josh Reddick, and Derek Holland. That hasn't deterred me, though, and I recently acquired this blank-back 1 / 1 for the Dickey collection. Like all the others, it comes encased in plastic with various Topps Vault stickers, embossing, holograms, serial numbers, and a certificate of authenticity for good measure.

I haven't figured out an elegant solution for storing all of my encased cards. They stick up out of the top of standard card boxes, they don't fit in the folding-lid style boxes, and I guess I may just have to put them in rows in some other kind of box. That leads to another problem, which is the fact that putting them in a separate location isolates my encased cards from the sets or mini-collections they belong to. One example off the top of my head is the Bryce Harper card from the 2013 Topps Archives Gold parallel set I built. It is graded and slabbed, and won't fit in the binder pages with the rest of them. Another problem is what to do with over-sized items like the certificates of authenticity that come with these blank-bank cards. Do I keep them in the box with the slabbed cards? Do I dare try to store them in the black hole that resides in my desk drawers? Do I put them on a bookshelf? I don't know what to do with them.

I also grabbed a copy of Dickey's Silver parallel. They look grey to me. I talked about how drab this year's crop of parallels feels compared to last year's Bowman release in my Derek Holland post of a couple days ago. Even the bright colors feel a bit muted, except maybe for the Yellow parallels. Maybe when Bowman Chrome releases there will be a welcome splash of color added to these rainbows.

My copy of the Dickey Silver parallel is numbered # 69 / 75.

In other R.A. Dickey-related news, I saw a couple of weeks ago that Topps' redemption update site had listed some of his cards as being filled. I checked the redemption site somewhat feverishly for a couple of weeks, and some shipping information finally posted. So hopefully by the end of the week I will have some nice redemption hits to post about.