Jim Miller and Amanda Nunes UFC Stuff

My wife and I had a pretty busy Saturday, trying to fit as much tourist stuff as we could into the weekend before Monday, when she heads back home and I get back to my training. We kicked the day off by traveling to Old Town San Diego.

Our first stop was the Mormon Battalion Visitor's Center. I visited it a handful of times when I was a missionary here many years ago, but since then they've remade the building and the tour with a higher-tech interactive presentation. I thought it was pretty good, telling the story of how several hundred Mormons were enlisted into the Army during the Mexican-American War and eventually assigned to build a wagon road to California, winding up in San Diego and helping to build the city.

I even found a wagon to drive, although it was woefully short on livestock to pull it. We panned for gold in the courtyard and looked at some artifacts, and then it was time for lunch. We had some great food at The Tequila Factory. I opted for carnitas, while my wife ordered some shrimp fajitas. It was good. We ate way too much, but it was worth it. After that we wandered down the street a bit and looked at shops and booths.

After that we headed out to Petco Park to watch the Padres take on the Pirates. We had some excitement on the way there, though. A car changed lanes into the side of my car, breaking my mirror and scraping/denting panels along the left side of my car. He looked over at me, then slowed down and pulled over as if to exchange information with us. We started to pull in behind him when he took off again, trying to execute a hit-and-run. We followed him, as did a couple of other cars. Eventually he got caught in traffic and we caught up to him in the left turn lane. He made a U-turn and then a quick right, and my wife got a picture of his license plate. After his next turn we were headed toward a couple of police cars with their lights on for another accident, so he flipped around again and took off. I decided not to chase him anymore, and we pulled up to the police and told them what had happened. We filed a report with them, and he got pulled over somewhere else while we were talking to the police. They couldn't arrest him for the accident because they didn't witness it, but hopefully with the license plate number and the police report we won't have too much trouble with our insurance company. It does stink to have my new car wrecked, though. I've only had it for about six months. Without anything else to do with the car, we continued on to the ballpark. 

It was free hat night, so we got Padres hats as we entered the gates. I posted this selfie on Twitter, and we saw it on the big scoreboard a few times during the game. I tried to take a picture of us on the scoreboard, but it was too bright and it washed out on my camera. It was a pretty good game, and the Padres beat the Pirates 4-2. That makes the Padres 2-0 when I am in attendance.

In addition to free hats, they had fireworks after the game. It was a good show, and between the game and the fireworks it was well worth the price of admission. We had to get one more picture on the way out. We packed a lot into one day, and it was a lot of fun. It stinks that some d-bag pulled a hit-and-run on us and smashed up my car, but I'm glad that neither of us was hurt. Hopefully my insurance company will take care of us. I haven't been extremely impressed with them lately, and if we have too much trouble on this claim I will definitely be switching companies.

There was a pretty big UFC event on Saturday night, but I totally missed it. It sounds like it was an okay event, unless you're a Daniel Cormier fan. I picked up a lot of cards that don't have anything to do with any of the fighters who fought in UFC 214 this weekend, but I can't make everything match current events. These first ones are a trio of Jim Miller autographs along with one Travis Browne signature. One of the Jim Miller cards is an auto-relic from 2017 Topps UFC Knockout. I also have a Miller autograph from 2011 Topps Finest, and the bottom two signatures come from 2014 Topps UFC Bloodlines. Another copy of that Jim Miller Bloodlines autograph appears in a post from a couple of days ago. I guess I am just a sucker for cheap UFC hits and parallels.

Additionally, I grabbed a trio of Jim Miller relic cards. The top one is a Finest Threads relic from 2011 Topps UFC Finest, while the mat relics hail from 2011 Topps UFC Finest and 2012 Topps UFC Finest. The 2011 mat piece comes from UFC 108, where Miller defeated Duane Ludwig. The 2012 mat relic comes from UFC on FX 1, where Miller defeated Melvin Guillard in the main event.

In addition to a bunch of Jim Miller cards, I also got four different parallel cards featuring Amanda Nunes. The biggest grab was the card in the upper left, a Blue Flame parallel from the online-only 2017 Topps UFC Fire product. That one is numbered # 11 / 25. The next two come from 2014 Topps UFC Champions. In the upper right is a Purple parallel numbered # 73 / 88, which was apparently a retail-only parallel. There was also a Hobby parallel numbered to # / 88, but it had blue borders. The card in the lower left is a Black parallel, numbered # 054 / 188. The card in the lower right comes from the next year's Champions release. It's a Black parallel, numbered # 091 / 188.

Breaking It Down 31: Some Good Stuff from TeamBreaks.com

We made some changes to our budget and I haven't been able to participate in the breaks over at TeamBreaks.com for a couple of weeks now, but I still have some scans of cards I got from breaks I participated in previously.

This first one didn't come directly from a box break. It came from one of the randoms after the breaks were done. I won the top prize, which was promised to be a pretty good UFC or WWE hit. When the package arrived my prize was this Finn Balor NXT In Line autograph from 2015 Topps WWE Undisputed. It's a pretty cool card but not something I was particularly interested in, so it went up on eBay. I got a decent price for it, although not quite as high as I hoped. Still, in the end I had a few dollars in my Paypal account that weren't there before.

This Paige VanZant Victorious Debut Commemorative Medallion did come from a box break. These things are a case hit out of 2015 Topps UFC Chronicles, so this was a pretty good item to snag for my spot in the break. There are plenty of other things I want more than this, though, so it went up on eBay as well. It sold right about at the price I thought it would. After eBay, Paypal, and the USPS all took their cut I had a little bit of credit left over in my Paypal account to cover some other stuff that will probably show up in a post at some point if it hasn't already.

This last card is the odd duck, as it really isn't good enough to be worth the effort of listing it on eBay. It's doomed to languish with all the other unwanted relics and autos in the back of some 5000-count card box because the cost of shipping it somewhere is more than it's worth. It's a 2012 Topps UFC Finest Jumbo Finest Threads relic card of Frankie Edgar, featuring a big blue swatch of t-shirt.

UFC 196 was pretty nuts, with Holly Holm and Conor McGregor both getting submitted in the big matches of the night. I thought especially the fight between McGregor and Diaz was entertaining, as they were exchanging some nice solid punches all through the early going. The fight results were pretty disappointing from the UFC's point of view, as McGregor and Holm are worth less with these defeats on their records and the losses muddy the waters as far as matchups going forward.