Another National Parallel

I've got a large number of NASCAR cards to post, and I am falling behind on getting to them. I try to reserve NASCAR for Sunday posting, but I may have to increase the frequency, as I've got enough to probably get me out past March. Panini's recent releases have injected a lot of new product into the market, and that's been good news for me. I am still able to get some of the older Press Pass stuff, but most of my recent buys have come from Panini.

This card came from the 2016 Panini The National set. It's a parallel of Danica's base card, numbered # 81 / 99. I don't know if Panini actually named these parallels, but I've seen a couple of places call this one by the name 'Wedges.' I like the look of it, and I've spent a lot of time trying to get one at a decent price. I didn't want to spend $10 on a card with a print run of nearly 100, so I waited, and waited, and waited some more until I found one at an acceptable price. It's hard to collect the #1 seller in NASCAR. She isn't the number one seller in NASCAR die-cast, but she is definitely tops when it comes to trading cards.

I watched both of the NFL Conference Championship games, which were about as dull as you could get. Both games seemed pretty well out of hand early on, and neither trailing team ever seemed like they were capable of making a comeback. If I have to pick a team to win the Super Bowl, I guess I choose the Falcons. My wife is from Atlanta, and her family and friends have at least a casual interest in seeing their local team win it all (my mother-in-law has already added a 'Rise Up' border to her Facebook profile photo). Beating New England will be a tough task, though, and I hope the Super Bowl winds up being a better match-up than today's games were.

More Star Wars Goodness by John Soukup

John Soukup is an artist who features heavily in my collection, and back in November I picked up another one. Wow, November was a long time ago! I am pretty far behind on my posts, and I've got enough queued up to get me through the end of February. This sketch actually appeared in my Carrie Fisher tribute post, but I haven't yet posted about it specifically.

I believe this card comes from the Topps Star Wars: Journey to The Force Awakens set, but I am not 100% sure on that. There are a lot of Topps sets based on The Force Awakens, and because I didn't buy a lot of those products I am not intimately familiar with the variances in the sketch card stock used for them. But Journey to The Force Awakens is my best guess.

I am inclined to believe that this was the reference photo used for the sketch. I don't always seek out reference photos for sketch cards, but I thought that C-3PO hanging out in a dark background like that was a little unsettling, and I had to see if it came from a film scene.

There isn't a whole lot else to say at the moment. Today was kind of a wasted day. I slept in and didn't do much else. I spent the last two days at work moving furniture around, and it kind of wiped me out. We are getting a new supervisor on Tuesday, and we wanted to get everyone moved around before he starts work. We had to shuffle things between three offices, and then move all of the extra stuff into the tiny office that was left over, aka the new storage closet. I found myself involved in almost every furniture move, and I also spent a lot of time running the carpet cleaner. I don't mind physical labor, but I was tired by the end of Friday.

(Re)Starting a WNBA Player Collection

A few posts ago I busted a box of 1999 Skybox WNBA Hoops trading cards. It was a product I chased when it released, but shortly afterward I got out of collecting and pretty much stopped following the WNBA. I mentioned in that post that I had decided to collect cards featuring point guard Ticha Penicheiro at that time, but hadn't gotten very far with that collection. I decided to look her up and see what was out there. She's got a few cards out there. COMC lists 47 cards for her. Beckett lists a total of 56 cards, with two of those being 1/1's. She's got a couple handfuls of serially-numbered cards, a few relic cards, and a few autographs. Overall it should be a challenging PC to build, but not an overwhelming one. The 1/1's are probably out of the question, but most everything else is numbered to #/50 or higher.

The first thing I went out and chased down was an autograph card. This is her 2006 Rittenhouse WNBA Autographs card, celebrating the Sacramento Monarchs 2005 WNBA Championship. Beckett says she has 4 more autographs out there, so this one gets me to 20% on the autograph front.

Penicheiro had a pretty good career in the WNBA, playing in 15 seasons for three different teams. She led the league in assists 7 times and is the current all-time leader in that category. She is second all-time in steals. She won one championship, made the All-Star Team four times, made the All-WNBA 1st Team twice, and the All-WNBA 2nd Team once. She was named one of the Top 15 WNBA players of all time in 2011 and one of the WNBA Top 20@20 in 2016.

Sketch Card Commission by Frank A. Kadar

Artist Frank A. Kadar has been on my art wish list for quite a while. Over the holidays he had a sale on sketch cards commissions in his webstore. I figured that was a pretty good excuse to add his work to my collection, and placed an order for a Power Girl sketch.

The website listed a 4-8 week turnaround time, but I think I got it quicker than that. Maybe it took the 4 weeks, but if it did, it wasn't much longer than that. I'm pretty happy with this one. It vaults right up into my top few favorite Power Girl sketches. I wish I had more to say about it, but it's just a really nice piece of art.

He included a business card with links to his various social media profiles. That Etsy store link at the bottom works, but it just redirects you to the Storenvy shop I linked to in the first paragraph. I liked my sketch so much, I went back and ordered another sketch card from him. I'll show it off eventually here on the blog.

I don't have much more to say at the moment. I think I'm fighting off another cycle of depression, and it's about all I can do just to get myself up in the morning for work and take care of my basic chores at home. I'm hoping I can push through it and get back into a more productive routine, but it usually takes a bit. Sometimes when I am down, even recreational stuff like blogging can feel like too much work. It's a lifetime disease, so I have to manage it as best I can, and sometimes that means all of my energy goes to boring stuff like keeping my job and making sure the bills get paid.

How Does This Happen?

I've posted a few times about my inability to track down a Danica Patrick tire relic from Panini's 2016 Prizm NASCAR product. I didn't want to pay too much, so I put in low bids on a lot of them, always getting outmatched by others who wanted to spend more than my idea of a fair price. Well, I finally won one...

...and then I won two more. Oops. I guess I got so used to throwing out lowball bids on these things that I kept bidding even when I was already the high bidder on one auction, and the prices suddenly dropped into my range. So now I've got three Danica Patrick tire relics from 2016 Panini Prizm NASCAR. These are all the base version and are unnumbered. I do like the design of these, with the car and the driver featured on the front. The main weakness (in my eyes) is the bland silver background. I have never like the basic Prizm look, with large expanses of dull silver foil. It would look my better with some color to it, like Panini has added in their Donruss Optic line.

We had some good news and some bad new yesterday. Unfortunately, the good news is pretty minor compared to the bad. The good news is that my wife's van repairs came in well under the budget I'd set aside for them. The bad news is that we had to have her new dog put down. A few months ago, one of her friends found a yellow lab as a stray, but they couldn't deal with her. My wife volunteered to take her in while we looked for the owner. No one ever came to the shelter looking for her, and we couldn't track down an owner, so we kept her. My wife named her Buttercup, but I called her Corn Dog. We got her spayed, vaccinated, and micro-chipped. Over the last couple of weeks her health has declined rapidly, so we took her to the vet. They told us that she was much older than we thought (10+ years, which is getting up there for a lab), and that she had a big tumor on her spleen. At her advanced age she probably would not survive an operation, so the vet recommended putting her to sleep. It stinks, especially for my wife, who has now lost two dogs in the last 8 months. I guess they are all family dogs, but we tend to identify our dogs as belonging to one spouse or the other. My wife favors Labradors and I lean toward Basset Hounds. I hope that Buttercup enjoyed the few months she spent with our family. We liked having her around.

This Relic is Not Related to the Event Commemorated by This Card

My brother-in-law and his family came up for the weekend for a family event we were having. My mother-in-law has been here since before Christmas. They are good people and I don't mind them, but I am an extreme introvert and having extra people around really drains my energy. They headed for home on Sunday, and I am hoping to stretch my legs a bit and maybe get a few things done in the man cave downstairs during this week. We'll see how it goes. It seems like there are always things that come up when you have plans. For example, the unplanned events of this weekend for me are my wife's car breaking down and needing a tow to the shop, a trip to the vet for our (relatively) new dog who has come down with something, and maybe helping my sister dig her car out of a snowbank.

Here is a card I've been trying to hunt down for a while now. It pops up with some frequency, but sellers usually want more for it than I am willing to pay. This copy popped up in my price range, and I got it. It's a 2016 Topps Series 1 Postseason Performance relic card of pitcher R.A. Dickey. His 2015 postseason with the Toronto Blue Jays was a bit of a mixed bag, as he had a good start against the Rangers in the ALDS and a very bad outing against the Royals in the ALCS. One really interesting thing about this relic is the disclaimer along the bottom there, which reads: "ITEM IS NOT FROM THE 2015 POSTSEASON". So this relic card celebrating the 2015 postseason contains a relic, but not one from a uniform worn during the 2015 postseason.

Even better is the disclaimer on this side of the card, which reads: "THE RELIC CONTAINED ON THIS CARD IS NOT FROM ANY SPECIFIC GAME, EVENT, OR SEASON, NOR IS IT FROM THE 2015 POSTSEASON." The descriptor text under the relic window says it is game-used, but who knows? I just thought it was funny that Topps made sure to indicate that the relic piece was not from the 2015 Postseason on both the front and back of the card. They really don't want anyone thinking that it was. The card is numbered # 066 / 100.

R.A. Dickey signed with the Atlanta Braves back in November. My wife is from Atlanta, but I have never been a fan of the various Atlanta pro teams. I will root for Dickey wherever he goes, though, so whenever he gets some cards in his Braves uniform, I will be there trying to collect them. Hopefully the move to the NL will help his numbers.

Click Here to View Cart 20: COMC Black Friday 2016 Haul

Some people around the blogging community go crazy during the annual Black Friday sale at COMC, buying up stacks of cards and taking advantage of free shipping offers for cards they've accumulated during the year. I personally probably haven't made the best use of COMC, as for whatever reason it is never among the first options on my mind when looking for cards to purchase. This past year I did find myself browsing the listings during the big sale, though, and I picked up a total of 6 cards.

The first card is this shiny Danica Patrick card from the 2016 Panini The National set. COMC is calling this parallel Hyperfoil. My card is numbered # 17 / 49. I've been tracking various versions of Danica's The National and The National - VIP cards on eBay, but haven't picked up nearly as many as I'd like. It seems like the prices plus shipping are always a little more than I want to spend. This one was on sale and I was able to combine shipping with the other cards in the order, so into the cart it went.

The other five cards in this order were all from the 2014 Topps Stadium Club Members Only parallel. I have a goal to add as many of these to my collection as I can, so I picked up the five cheapest ones that I didn't yet have copies of in my collection. The horizontal card from the lot is pitcher Chris Archer.

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The other four are Josh Hamilton, Michael Wacha, Nelson Cruz, and Julio Teheran. No huge superstar names here, but I was happy to add five more of these to my collection without completely breaking the bank. I had several more in my cart for a while, but they were in higher price tiers and I ultimately decided to just pare my order down to these ones. I've already progressed much further with this collection than I ever thought I would. I know I am not ever going to complete the set, so I feel less pressure to gather them all. That frees me up to seek out the best deals I can and pass unreasonably-priced cards.

Although these aren't serially-numbered, the rumor is that only 5-10 copies of each Members Only card were printed. As time goes by I would expect the supply to really dry up, but here in early 2017 there are still a few to be found. I think that in some ways the passage of time helps, as people have probably moved on from 2014 Topps Stadium Club in the search for the next hot thing, and this is a parallel set that kind of flies under the radar.

I also got one scratch-off ticket in the package, which netted me a $5 credit on the site. I used the money to purchase a card that I had already purchased once. The seller sent me a different card (which I also needed for my collection), and I let it slide. The card I actually purchased popped up on COMC around the time I scratched my ticket, and I negotiated a discounted price on it with the seller. Pretty dramatic stuff. Right now it is sitting in my COMC account. I will have it shipped to me some day in conjunction with another order.