Recovering Waxaholic

I've been so busy with work and football I haven't had a chance to post my trade with Brian at Waxaholic. Sorry, dude. The cards were cool and he sent me a bunch of unopened packs of what some people call "junk wax". I don't like to use that terminology in my house: I feel that all wax is cool in some way or another and shouldn't be refered to as junk. In my case cards from the years that I stopped collecting are all new to me, so it's the first time I've seen cards with these designs.





These don't scan very well. A nice piece of history in a square mini card.



I like how the players are cut out and placed against the blue background.


These cards are from 1991. That doesn't seem so long ago, but it still makes me feel kind of old. 1991 shouldn't look so dated should it?


J.R.Reid with a Kid and Play haircut that was all the rage back then.


I used to be a Reggie Miller fan.





"K-Man"! When I say that out loud it always reminds me of Jerry calling Kramer "K-man."


These cards are a little dorky. Bo knows rifles! Or maybe Bo knows how to make me cross eyed. I wonder what the idea was behind the crazy lines shooting out at us?




Yay!
Cool.






A couple of cool Mets.

Micheal J. Fox... Wait. Nope some other dude. This guy looks like me all through the eighties and early nineties. I think I wore that exact same uniform every day. White tennis shoes, worn out jeans and a red polo shirt. Come to think of it, I still pretty much dress like that now. I don't have the time to spend playing Donkey Kong though. I would freak out if I found an actual arcade somewhere. I guess I'll have to settle for playing my Playstation 2 if I have an itch for video games.


Cool cartoon card.


Delgado mini. Nice!! I have the base and now the mini. I'd like to chase all the Mets from Goodwin.


Thanks again for the cool cards!!

trade with Play at the Plate

Brian from Play at the Plate sent over some cool cards in exchange for my Neftali chrome and a few others I set over.

He sent me a bunch of shiny cards in return.

I've pulled a few of these Dick Perez cards, but never a chrome version.









These Ticket to Stardom cards are nicer in person than they look online. The design is sort of growing on me. They seem a little thin, but not much more than other current cards. I like that the player is shown coming out of the frame and the team colors around the photo border.


I like cards that have a line of stats, but also a nice bio or recap of a certain event or game.





The Masterpiece cards are always nice. But compared to the Ticket to Stardom, they're really not that much thicker. I think it's just the "canvas" layer on the front that makes them feel a little thicker or well made.




I think this is the first A&G card that has a player in an action shot with the watercolor background instead of the natural background. Maybe it's just the first one that I've noticed.


When I look at this card the first thing I think of is Beardy! Funny how that works. He's having a custom card contest over at his blog. You guys should check it out.




This is one of my few experiences with a non licensed product, and yet I immediately knew that this was an OU player. Looking at it more closely, I realized that it was devoid of any team logos on the jersey or helmet. Still, it's a pretty cool card! I love to get any OU guys either in their college or pro uniforms. I'm really glad that he sent me these cards.

Check out his blog sometime. He's a big Rangers fan. Thanks for the cards!!

The best laid plans of mice and men

In my post about buying my boxes of Updates and Highlights and Series Two Baseball, I might have come across a little too sure of myself. Arrogant. A little cocky, perhaps. One of the few times in life that I thought I had everything figured out. Well, you know the saying about assumptions, right?

Well, I'm new to this card collecting thing and I just assumed that needing only 90 cards to finish the set that it would be a cake walk to finish up that set and get to work on all the other stuff that I'm trying to finish.

I think maybe my collecting needs are getting out of hand. I'm trying to finish too many things and with my depleted funds, it's getting harder and harder to finish.

Anyway, after finishing the hobby box I still have 13 cards left to finish the set. The only thing I've got to show for it are quite a few doubles and a few inserts to trade away.

This brings me to the next part of my post. I'm including scans of cards that I've pulled recently that are all up for trade.

If anybody is so inclined, just leave a message and let me know if you're interested in any of these cards and I'll send them over.




Here's a Rocco bat relic up for trade. It's my second Rocco bat relic.


I don't really need two of them, but I'm keeping the Allen and Ginter card to go with my relics that I've pulled. So far I've pulled a bat, pants, jersey relic and an autograph. Not that they're from any players that I actively collect, it's just that I have at least one example of the relics from 2009 A&G.


I love this card, but I pulled two of these in my hobby box so one of them is up for grabs.
















If anybody see's anything they like, feel free to comment or e-mail me and we can trade some cards!!
I also have a trade/want list over at: no one's going to trade for this

final packs of Highlights and Updates

I'm going to leave this post as short as possible. I have some more exciting stuff to show later, plus I've been crazy busy, so I'm going to leave most of the post to the cards and not muddy it up with boring words.





Some of these Ring of Honor cards look kind of neat. These two are ones I'd like to keep, the rest I've pulled are going on the trade block soon.


This is my first auto I've pulled from the Topps flagship.



I remember this guy from this card. Actually I'm only familiar with his brother. The card is kind of nice though. The sticker is a little off center, but still okay. Maybe I can finally find a Diamond Backs friend who might want this.






The Propoganda cards are great! I might have to finish this sub set.


Cool grainy night shot. I like how in these night shots the light hits the bottom of the stands brighter than at the top. A nice graduated background as a contrast to the player in his colorful uniform.


It funny that most of these ToppsTown cards are laughable, except when you pull a player that you actually like. I'm hoping that any kids that are collecting today have fun redeeming these online.


This is my first black border card.



These cards are all numbered to 58.


Wade Boggs in a Rays uniform. Cool. I pulled the SP of him in a Red Sox jersey.

Alright that's all for now, hopefully I can post the other cards I'm interested in trading away. Thanks for reading!

I'm swearing off corn!!!

That's right, from now until oh about November 2011 I'm swearing off corn. No cans of corn, no corn on the cobb and sadly, no popcorn. That's going to be a hard one to give up because I really like popcorn.



After going to Nebraska this weekend I'm not sure if I can look at corn the same way. Actually after seeing my team look like they've never played college football before, I'm not sure I can look at them the same way either.

Don't get me wrong the Corn Husker fans are the best in college football.

They even have a sign outside their stadium to remind them.


My dad looking at my awesome parking spot. We were about 20 yards next to the stadium. You can see part of the stadium in the upper left corner.



I really loved hanging out with the fans before and during the game. They were some of the most well behaved and awesome fans to tailgate with before the game. They were knowledgeable about football and their team, our team, everybody's team. Of course theirs always going to be a few yahoos that don't know how to act, but it was a good experience overall.


Before the game we had hung around on campus and went to the natural history museum.


It was cool. Lots of neat stuff.

These butterflies immediately reminded me of Goodwin Champions and one of the reasons why I was so hot for these cards when they came out.



I need to pull one of those butterfly redemption's. Redemption is an ugly word these days, but I think Upper Deck is doing much better in that department.



Darwin was really into beetles. Lots and lots of different sizes of beetles.

As I mentioned before our team didn't do so good, we were able to drive down the field, but interceptions and penalties killed us. Nebraska and OU both have pretty good defenses. I think Nebraska's is better. They intercepted our quarterback 5 times in the game. They put pressure on us and were great at covering our receivers.

They had a pretty good offensive game plan too. They haven't had the offensive output that they wanted this season, so they felt playing conservative and being patient would eventually pay off for them. It did, starting with the first interception being returned to our 1 yard line. They scored a touchdown which would be the difference in the game. As it turns out, it was their fourth offensive touchdown in as many games.

I had wondered why their were so many balloons in the stands.



Now I know. When they score a touchdown, they shoot off all of their.... balloons.
Kind of strange, we shoot off fireworks in Norman, they shoot off balloons.


Seriously the entire Saturday felt like I was in bizarro-world.


If I recall correctly their quarterbacks were 4-9 for like 39 yards or something crappy like that. They had two big runs on offense and that's about it as far as their offensive production goes.

We had our chances to even the score, but we only made 1 field goal out of 4. That's right, he missed 3 field goals and we went for it on fourth and one twice only to convert once.
The conversion we attempted is the one that burns me.

I'm not sure what you call the play. It's a mis-direction run play. Sort of like a toss sweep where everybody sweeps to one side and instead of handing off or tossing to the RB the quarterback flips the ball to the other running back going to the other direction and he is left alone on the opposite side. The problem with this play last Saturday is that we didn't set it up with any rushing offense.

We were able to move the ball decently with the pass, but we didn't run very well. Nebraska knew this of course, unfortunately our own coaches didn't realize that a call like this wouldn't be successful and tried it anyway.

Nebraska committed 8 guys to this play and three of them stayed home and basically it was three against one. We were stopped for a two yard loss. This was after we had missed two field goals.

We first used this play in 2004 with Jason White as our quarterback and Adrian Peterson as our running back. I think we debuted it against Texas. With A.D. as your RB, he's going to get yardage pretty much no matter what. He has speed, size and the ability to make something out of nothing. Our current guys are good, but they're not that good. Nobody is. Plus we didn't help him out at all. The crowd went nuts and I felt it was out of reach at 7-0. I mean, not scoring when we have so many chances really is frustrating.

The final score was 10-3. If only we could have made those field goals. So sad that I'm praying for field goals. This was the first time we haven't scored a touchdown since 1998.

Oh well, hopefully this will toughen these guys up for next year. Because of Big XII scheduling we don't play Nebraska every year, so it looks like I'm going to waiting a long time for my corn. That's not to say we'll beat them in 2011 either, so maybe I'll have to swear off corn for the rest of my life. Thank goodness I'm not swearing off beef because of our losses to the Longhorns. I'd starve!


Hopefully we can rebound next week against Texas A&M. At the very least we can see a good band at halftime. The Fighting Aggie Band is legendary and is really a sight to see.