I Haz a Happee!

Got a call today from one of the companies I interviewed with last week letting me know their intent to make a job offer later this week and feeling me out about my salary requirements. Let's call them Company A. My preferred job is with Company B. However, as luck would have it, Company B is a mostly owned subsidiary of Company A so everyone knows what is up and, with any luck, I may have two written offers on my desk by the end of the week. At the very least, I will have one.

That called for a celebration. So, I went to a card shop! I didn't go wild. I mainly just pawed through several boxes of 1976 commons and knocked off a good size chunk of my want list. But, since commons seemed so....common, I splurged on one big ticket card.

Alas, I have chores to take care of, so I will have to post later, but suffice it to say:

Blowing the Dust Off

It has been a while since I've posted here. I thought I would drop in to dust a bit and offer a bit of an explanation.



Yeah. And that isn't some one-off mini-heat wave either. The daily high has been over 100F every day since June 29th, except for two days, and the highs on those two days was 97F and 99F, respectively. We have had virtually no rain, so I have dropped a G and a half on hay this month. The one day in June we did get rain, it was accompanied by enough hail to basically total the roofs (rooves?) on my house and barn. So, I have the pleasure of dealing with the insurance and mortgage companies, along with finding a contractor to replace them.

So with a general lack of energy, and a very specific lack of money, it has been pretty quiet on the card front. But, I am still planning a review of the 2004 Upper Deck Yankees Classics card set. Plus, there will be a big card show in town on August 13 and 14. I am hoping I will be able to knock off a big chunk of the remaining cards on my 1977 Topps set at the show. So, maybe I'll have a few posts coming up here soon.

If I don't spontaneously combust beforehand.

My Week in Review, Part 2

As I had mentioned, I had to fly out of Dallas Sunday evening for a business trip. What I may not have mentioned is that my meeting was in the town of Eu, in the Upper Normandy region of France. Because Eu is small (population less than 8000), I stayed in a hotel in Dieppe, a short distance east along the Channel Coast. As an amateur photographer, I was looking forward to getting out and shooting. I took my backup camera with a basic 18-55mm lens (a decision I regret.) Alas, my plans didn't work out so well.

For one thing, I was travelling with my boss, who is something of a workaholic while on the road. We would get to the office at around 8 AM and work through to 7 or 7:30 PM. So, I only got out one evening when I took a short walk down to the harbor in Dieppe. Even then, the photography was challenging since I was at the port in the evening and half the port was in shadow and half in sun. Coupled with the limited range of the lens that made it almost impossible to not be in a high contrast situation, I wasn't real happy with much of the pictures I took. But here are a few:



The Chateau de Dieppe



The chalk cliffs at Dieppe, subject of a famous Monet painting.



St. Jacques Cathedral




St. Laurence O'Toole Church in Eu overlooking the parking lot of the facility I was at.













Various shots from the Harbor.

To tie this to the general theme of this blog, I would note that baseball is played in France although it doesn't rise much above the level of a club sport. Several years ago, the LA Times published a great article about baseball in France. Money quote:

It's still not a game children play in the garden or during a barbecue. As is regularly noted, if you hand a French child a baseball, he'll immediately drop and try to kick it. (Of course, that's how the 1962 Mets played, and they won a World Series a few years later.)

Coming tomorrow: Back home to surprise and routine.

Hello, World

I am not really sure what I want to accomplish here, other than to amuse myself some. I have recently gotten back into collecting baseball cards and thought I would try my hand at setting up a blog. A few housekeeping details:

1. How did I get here? Well, for reasons I cannot recall, I started reading baseball card blogs and it reawakened my interest in collecting. The two blogs that started me down this path were 83F Project and The Greatest 21 Days.
2. Collecting History? I don't recall how I got started, but I collected sports cards during the mid to late 1970s. Mainly baseball, but also football. I also collected, for a while, hockey stickers that were distributed by the Loblaw's grocery chain. I stopped collecting when I hit high school and took on the teenage angst pose. I ended up selling my cards off to help me buy a better bike when I joined the bicycle racing team during my freshman year in college.
3. What am I collecting? Back as youth, my first baseball glove was a Wilson Paul Blair model. So, I decided to start off collecting his baseball cards. I figured that there would be about 17 cards, one for each year in his career. Having gotten out of the hobby before the proliferation of manufacturers, I had no idea that there would be reissues and various "legends of the game" series. At this time, I have identified 54 70 total Paul Blair cards, of which I have 24. I am also collecting 1974 and 1978 Topps baseball sets. At this point, I have 691 out of 726 from the 1978 series and 125 out of 660 from the 1974 series.
4. Team Interests? I grew up in Rochester, New York as a Yankees fan during the glory days of the late 1970s. I can remember sneaking a transistor radio into bed so I could surreptitiously listen to late games from the West Coast. I can also vaguely remember listening to Ron Guidry's 18 strikeout performance on June 17, 1978. I stopped following baseball in college during the mid-1980s and only started following it again recently. Still a Yankees fan. I also follow the local minor league team, the AAA Oklahoma Redhawks.
5. What am I going to do? Over the last month, I have occasionally, on a lark, picked up one of the those cheap repackages of cards at our local Target. I have found all manner of odd cards mixed in. Some are amusing. Some are just confusing. So, I thought I'd blog about those cards that catch my attention for all the wrong reasons. I also engage in a little amateur photography, so I may post about cards that interest me from that perspective.
6. What is that picture in the header? It was taken at the September 4, 2010 game between the Oklahoma Redhawks and Omaha Royals. That is Omaha second baseman Marc Maddox batting against the Redhawks Zachary Phillips. The crows is pretty sparse since the game started at about 11:00 AM on a Saturday. It isn't usually SRO, but normally there are larger crowds.The original is actually a fairly good shot. Taken at 1/2000 of a second, F/3.5, ISO200, Focal length of 18mm. Unfortunately, the original image is almost 3000 pixels wide and a lot of resolution is lost scrunching it down to fit the banner.

So, there it is. We'll see where this takes me.