Getting Caught Up, and a Box of 2017 BBM Shining Venus

I've been trying to get caught up on things this weekend, and I spent a lot of today putting together a couple of overdue packages for other bloggers. There are still several that I am working on building, but it is nice to have a small stack of packages taped up with postage attached.

In addition to my usual annual BBM True Heart wrestling card boxes, I added some BBM Shining Venus cards to my order. Ryan G over at This Card is Cool has already broken this set down in great detail, but I'll talk about it a little here. Above you can see the top of the box. Each box has 20 packs, with 5 cards per pack. A little bit of numberology tells me that's 100 cards per box.

The bottom of the box has a checklist on it. There are 87 cards in the base set, 9 cards in an insert set, and some parallels and autographs.

Each subject in the set gets three cards. One is a Shining Venus card, the other is a Playing Venus card, and the last is a Venus Shot card. From what I can tell, the Shining Venus card is usually a posed picture of the athlete with her sporting implements, the Playing Venus card features an action photo, and the Venus Shot is a picture of the athlete in street clothes.

In the box I purchased, I got 78 / 87 base cards (89.7%) and 17 doubles. It was disappointing that I didn't get a full base set, but I kind of expect that from BBM products. If it's a pack-based product instead of a boxed set, you shouldn't expect a complete set from one box.

The subjects of the set are all women, and the checklist of sports is pretty extensive. There are traditional sports represented, like rugby and running, as well as niche sports that include unicycling and fin swimming. 

The set has foil signature parallels. I pulled one Gold Foil Signature parallel of Misaki Ogawa, numbered # 57 / 80. I think there is a more limited Rainbow Foil Signature parallel available. The insert set is called Sparkle Venus. That checklist is nine cards deep. I pulled two of them. They feature the athletes in street clothes and the cards have a shiny gold finish to them. There are silver holofoil parallels of this insert set, too, and those are serially-numbered.

I also got two autographs in the box. Both feature sticker signatures. The card on top has the signature of fin swimmer Satsuki Fujimaki. I believe it is the basic autograph. My copy is numbered # 017 / 117. The other signature in my box is a special Happy New Year! autograph. I think there are also Valentine's Day autographs. 2017 was the year of the Rooster, so there are a couple of roosters in the design of the card. These are more limited, and my autograph of basketball player Naoko Chikahira is numbered # 14 / 30.

This was a pretty fun product to sample. I don't know if I will pick up more boxes in search of a full base set, but I might. It is nice to get such a large variety of sports in one set. You don't really see that in the United States outside of Olympic years.

To continue the theme of catching up, I've had a few notable things happen in my real life. The first is joining the ranks of the tattooed. I'd been thinking about getting a tattoo honoring my military service for over a decade now, but the time never felt right. I actually went in to get it done about five years ago, but the tattoo artist wouldn't listen to what I was asking for and I walked away, waiting another five years for the right artist to come along. I got a flag and a unit combat patch done on my right shoulder, to mirror the flag and combat patch on that sleeve of my uniform. The names and dates are the years I deployed to Iraq, and the anarchy symbol with the 'M' inside is a brotherhood tattoo that several members of a unit I spent 13 years in got after our first deployment in 2004-05. I may add a background to tie it all together later, but I'm not in a hurry.

On the other arm I got an action scene featuring the four comic book characters that my kids are named after. This one isn't finished yet, as I still have at least one more session to get all the colors filled in.

The other big news recently is that we got another dog. My wife saw this Basset Hound puppy on Facebook, and she had to have her. Last weekend she drove several hours each way to pick the dog up, and so Poppy joined our family. She is three months old, and she is a lot of trouble. We're still working on her potty training, and she bites everything. Our yellow Lab likes her quite a bit, and they play together in spite of the massive size difference between them. My Basset Hound is old and grouchy, and he does not like the energetic little biting machine. He spends most of his time perched on top of furniture where she can't reach him.