13 May 2024

Recent Meanderings

I mentioned in my last post that I was going out of town for a bit. The short version is that my dad and I went to Russia to hunt bears. We were successful in that regard, shooting some very large bears.

We also wound up staying in Russia for 12 extra days, with 2 days of questioning by the police and 10 days spent in jail. Our hunting outfitter didn't have all of the paperwork in order, so we were found guilty of an Administrative Violation and the judge threw the book at us, so instead of a $50-$100 fine we got 10 days in jail. It wasn't too bad outside of the boredom. All of the police and guards we interacted with were polite and professional.


Here we are celebrating our freedom after our flight out of Moscow landed in Istanbul. It was a pretty crazy adventure, not one I'm likely to replicate in the near future.


I got a handful of cards in the mail while I was gone, mostly Pokémon I purchased for my Pokémon GO project, where I am trying to get one card for each type of Pokémon I catch in the mobile game. I am well behind the curve on that project, and it will likely take me several years to catch up, if I ever in fact do catch up.


As is typical for me, I've been struggling with whether or not to continue my card collecting, and if so, what form that collecting should take. I find that when I'm into it heavily, I spend more money than I can really afford. When I'm not into it, I have a lot of negative feelings about not being able to dabble in everything that I'm interested in.


All of that waffling has led me into a bit of a slump. I've stopped several ongoing projects, and find myself passing over cards at my usual venues. I did stand in Walmart the other day and mull over buying some Heritage baseball and some WWE Chronicles, but ultimately walked away without buying anything. This year's Heritage set is arguably one of the coolest ones to be released, but I just can't bring myself to get into it halfway, and I don't feel like I can afford to get into it all the way.