An Appropriate Christmas Gift

I am, by my own admission, a difficult to person to buy gifts for.  My wife doesn't understand my collection and has wisely chosen to steer clear of it at gift giving times.  Beyond that, my life is uncomplicated.  I like to cook and eat, and take care of our farm.  I mostly have what I need for both and will generally buy what I need if there is something I don't have. 

This year, the main thing I wanted for Christmas was a new refrigerator.  We had our current one for 16 years and the thermostat would occasionally flake out and freeze the produce.  So, with 2020 being the way it was, we saved money by not eating out much at all and finally bit the bullet and got a nice new fridge.

But, beyond that, what was my poor beleaguered spouse to do?  

Befitting of any couple that has been together 30 years, we share a common language. Not so much a verbal language, though it is expressed in words. It is a language that really references shared experiences (think of the Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."

(Non-relevant) example #1: Like most long term couples, we understand each other so thoroughly we can finish each other's sentences.  When we do that our comment is "Lobsters!" This is a reference to a scene in the sitcom "Friends."

(Relevant) example #2:  When she asks me for gift ideas, I generally don't have much of an idea. So, I borrow a line from a movie we both love "A Christmas Story" and say "I don't know, maybe just some Tinkertoys."

When my wife was back in Ohio helping care for her mother, she visited a thrift store in her hometown that resells donations in order to raise money for charity.  This store always has high quality goods and clothes for sale and she usually ends up buying stuff every time we are back.  Her trip last month was no exception, other than she found a gift for me.  And, now that you have read this far, what was that gift?

I am just tickled to death with this gift. I had these as a wee boy. I'm not going to start collecting vintage Tinkertoys, but i am going to find a prominent place to display it as I reorganize my home office next week.  

Here is hoping that you are having a joyous holiday season and please accept my best wishes for a normal New Year.

What I am listening to: Ronin by Sturgill Simpson

Revisiting a Recent Pickup

I decided to go back and give you an update on a recent pickup of mine:

I know it isn't baseball cards, but it just tickles me to death.  I have 17 acres and my neighbor to the north has 40. I can let two of my dogs run, as they will go off exploring but come back after a while.  I have one dog, a Great Pyrenees-Anatolian Shepherd mix that I cannot let run, as he doesn't come back.  But, he has the Great Pyrenees desire for a territory to patrol.  So, I try to take him for walks on my, and my neighbors, property.  Today, Daisy the barn cat came with us.  Buddy wasn't happy since I wasn't going to take anything other than the shortest loop with a cat in tow, but he'll get over it.

Favorite Surprise Pickup of 2013

Being in this hobby, we all know the joy of finding something wonderful when you were least expecting it.  I had a fair number of serendipitous pickups in 2013.  But, this is my favorite:

You may recall someone dumped a dog out in the country near my home in early October and we took her in a couple weeks later and named her Abby.  She can be seen above playing with Buddy, the Great Pyrenees mix, who was, coincidentally, my favorite surprise pickup of 2011.  She is a great dog, although she is still a puppy and can get in a bit of trouble at times.

What I Am Listening To: I'll Drink to You by Duke Jupiter (it's a Rochester thing)

Surprise Pickup

Sigh.  The perils of living in the country.......

Little Brothers Suck

Or so I am led to infer.

I was at a show a few months back and came across this at one of the seller's tables.  I didn't have a little brother myself, so I found this hilarious.  YMMV.

Synchronicity

Some of you may not know who Nate Silver is.  Nate is most well known as a statistician that does analysis of political polls and uses the information to forecast election results.   His blog at the New York Times is called Five Thirty Eight, referencing the total number of electoral votes in the US Presidency race. Silver is also a sabermetrician.

I am not much interested in sabermetrics.  To be sure, I think they have their place, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn more about them. 

Now, that said, please read this Michael Gerson column in yesterday's Washington Post about Nate's political forecasting.  That is basically the same column written by any number of crusty old sportswriters about sabermetrics, just applied to political science. Amirite?

 
If you haven't, go and vote today.  It is one of our most important civic duties.

That is all.

A Great Sunday

Wow, what a great Sunday it was.  Did you watch that Yankees-Orioles game last night?  CC was fantastic and what a ninth inning!

But, that wasn't the highlight of my day.  My wife and I went to see a small airshow by the Commemorative Air Force and splurged on a ride in a C45 Expeditor personal transport plane.

The flight was $65 per person for a 20 minute flight and it was well worth it. Right up there with the ride we took on one of the wooden boats at the Antique Boat Museum up in Night Owl Country.  There was also a B29 Superfortress there as well, but at $595 and up for a flight, we decided to just admire it from terra firma.

Just Shoot Me

At 8 PM

I had an odd thought today. Growing up in Upstate New York, we didn't have air conditioning until my senior year in high school.  It is days like today that kinda make we wish I still lived there.

My Life is Boring

Whomever had my cell phone number before I did apparently leads a more interesting life than I do.

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:

Starting to Come Back

So, after my morose come-down bullshit (obscure movie reference) the other day, I am starting to climb out of the hole I dug for myself.


About 3 weeks ago, I had a phone interview for a job with a local midstream energy company. That led to a face-to-face interview last Friday, which seemed to go well. Following on from that, tomorrow I have a lunch date with the hiring manager and one of his organization's key internal clients. So, I am guessing I am still in the running. Which is good because, after 3 days of unemployment, I am finding that the role of house frau doesn't fit me well.

Additionally, over the last few days I have received two trade packages and a rather thick, unsolicited package from another card blogger and that has greatly improved my mood.

I am starting to map out some posts in between looking for work and my household chores. It will probably be a few days more before they start to appear. But, for those that have inquired, I'm doing fine and hope to be back in the swing here soon.

And, no, I have no intent of getting any Series 1. Job or not.

23 Years, 4 Months, 21 Days

On September 6, 1988, I walked into an office building on North 12th Street in Reading, Pennsylvania to start my post-college career. Through all the intervening time (though divestitures, mergers, and corporate re-branding changed the name on the top left corner of my paycheck,) I worked for the same company.

At approximately 4 PM today, in a home office in the Cross Timbers east of Norman, Oklahoma, I will log off, power down a laptop, and stuff it in a box to be shipped back to it's rightful owner. After 23 years, 4 months, and 21 days, it will be over. There is no gold watch waiting at the end of the day, if such a thing is even done anymore. No conference room send-off with a hastily purchased sheet cake and soon-to-be-unkept promises to stay in touch. Just me, the laptop, and uncertainty. To be honest, I prefer it that way. When life forced me to divorce ego from pride, I put away a need for grand gestures.


I finished Josh Wilker's Cardboard Gods this morning. It's a funny thing. How different our paths through life have been, Josh and me. And yet, I find myself identifying so strongly with him. Both standing on a precipice, looking at the future, wondering where that next step will lead.

My box of Obak arrived yesterday. Opening it brought me no respite. I have carefully placed the cards back into the packs, the packs back into the box, and set it aside for another day. I'm doing the same with this blog. It may only be a few days or it may be longer. I don't know. I'll be back when I am not such a fucking downer.

A Modern Woody Guthrie

I know it is consider anathema to dip into politics when we have the infinitely more important subject of baseball cards to cover. But, dang, Bruce has done it again.

A Day in the Sun

My temporary retirement from collecting was tough this weekend. I just had an urge to go to a card shop (or show) and paw through some boxes. But, I fought off those feelings. I did, however, spend some time with 1200 lbs of muscle supporting a brain the size of a walnut.



Ha Ha. Just kidding.

No Excuses Any More

I guess since I am on hiatus from card collecting, I don't have any excuses for avoiding my chores, now do I?

Happy Holidays!

The Gill Man - Evolution, Part 1

Here is a random 2004 GOTG card to act as a reference point:



I started with this image cropped to the correct proportions:


The first step was to adjust the image background to be visible but faded. The first thing I did was use the Photoshop quick selection tool to select everything in the image except the Gill Man. Once that was accomplished, I added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. When you add an adjustment layer after making a selection, that layer only changes the area selected. With that layer, I cranked up the lightness, with the following result.



I left more detail in the image background than the real GOTG cards had, since the image was so iconic and I really wanted to have the heroine recognizable. Of course, the model card above had a more sepia tone to it. Luckily, the hue and saturation adjustment allows the image to be colorized. So, I clicked the colorize box, then adjusted the hue into the yellow range. At this point, I also softened the edges of the selection and added an embossing effect to bring in the shadow around The Gill Man. That took a lot of trial and error and I didn't do it in a way to save the intermediate step. So, all of the changes in this paragraph led to this result:



The next step was to add the border. This was fairly simple. I opened a real GOTG card image, scaled it up to the same size as my base image, then selected the border and hit Control-C to copy the selection. I went back to the Gill Man image, pasted it on.


This is where one of the weaknesses of my effort is noticeable. The border was at a different level of detail resolution which is blatantly obvious when you zoom in.


Next, I added the Fleer logo, and embellishment at the bottom, by using the lasso tool to select it on a real GOTG card then drop it into a new layer on my image.


Then I added a layer mask and used the pencil tool to mask out all the white space around the logo so the underlying image shows through:


I wasn't real happy how the logo looked at this point. So I cranked up the intensity of the red channel on the crown and lowered the brightness on the script to make it pop better:


The last part to complete the card front was to add text, which is a fairly simple thing to do. I had to make one change here. On the real cards, the text is in silver foil. But, that would not show up well in a digital image, so I decided to put the text in black. Also,the layout of the card led to a problem. Where the text went on top of the Gill Man, it disappeared:


To resolve this, I determined the "base" color of the card, since it wasn't pure white and dropped a solid layer of that color down over the top of the card. I then added a layer mask and basically brought the complete underlying image back in except for a one pixel border around the text where it crosses over the Gill Man's legs, so it can be more visible.


And that was it. The front of the card.

The Gill Man - Conception

Now that my entry in Thorzul's Nightmare on Cardboard contest has been revealed, I thought I would do a few posts on how I created it.

I don't rightly recall why I chose the Creature From the Black Lagoon for my subject matter. I'm not up on any of the current monster movie villians. The last horror movie I saw was "The Blair Witch Project." And, even then, it was probably at least 15 years since the previous time I saw a horror movie. I don't see a lot of movies, but when I do it is either a screwball comedy or a Coen Brothers movie. Everything else, for the most part, doesn't get me into the theater.

So, let's talk a bit about how I saw The Creature on a baseball card.


First off, in the movie credits, the character name is The Gill Man, not any of the various permutations of The Creature. So that was easy enough. As far as choosing a team name, I had a recollection of a minor league team with the word Swamp in it's team name, so I googled it up and, viola, the Shreveport Swamp Dragons. Also easy.


The information on the back is a little more obscure in it's origin. As I was looking at the IMDB entry for The Creature From the Black Lagoon, I noticed that there was two different actors that played The Gill Man. Ricou Browning did the underwater scenes and Ben Chapman played in the land scenes. As it happens, there was a major league baseball player also named Ben Chapman. So, I used his vitals and major league statistics. The only thing I changed was the birthplace. I figured it would stretch the limits of credibility that The Gill Man would be born in Nashville, Tennessee. So, since the movie was supposedly set along the Amazon River, I chose a city that was along the river. So, there it is. Not an overly complex explanation, but now you know what I was thinking.

In my next post about this card, which I will probably post tonight, I'll walk those of you who are interested through the process of creating this card. It will probably be a fairly long post and only of interest to Photoshop geeks, but I had so much fun with this, I figured I'd immortalize the process, so I can reference it next year when I may try a Killer Klowns from Outer Space theme.

Boo! - Halloween Post

When you live out in the sticks, Halloween tends to pass out of your consciousness. While I am not exactly out in the middle of nowhere, (I am only 6 miles from the center of town), I am one of only three residences along this one mile stretch of road. You just don't get trick-or-treaters out here. The country kids head into town for their goodies. So, I don't have much connection to the holiday anymore.

But, I did one Halloweeny type thing this year. I entered Thorzul's Nightmare on Cardboard contest. I figured it would be a good test of my rudimentary Photoshop skills. Here is my entry:




His theme was Not Topps, which is fine with me. I chose the 2004 Fleer Greats of the Game card as my template. It is a set I like, and it wasn't going to be overly complicated to work with. I figured with the off-season/holiday season hobby slowdown, I might indulge my inner geek and blog about how I went about creating this. It probably won't be of interest to most of you, but I had a blast working on this and would like to make a record of the process. I see three posts out of this:

1. Information Content

2. Front Design

3. Back Design

If I actually follow through, I'll add hyperlinks to that list later.

Random Thoughts for a Saturday Morning

1. Leftover Chicken Jalfrazi is an awesome breakfast


2. Would you trade 660 cards for 3? I am in the process of closing a deal to trade my 2011 Topps 60th Anniversary commemorative set for three cards from 1971: Luis Aparicio, Willie Mays, and Roberto Clemente.


3. I'm still a little ticked that the Yankees left Bartolo Colon off their roster for the ALDS against Detroit


4. The Yankees-Tigers game tonight better not get rained out. I was able to get out of going to the OU-Ball State football game with my wife in order to stay home and watch it.


5. I'm going to smoke some ribs and chill down some Bridgeport Cafe Negro coffee infused porter to feast on during the game tonight.


6. I really need to get organized. I know I have a Justin Verlander relic around here somewhere, but can't seem to find it. After the monster season he had, I really need to throw it up on EBay and see what I can get for it.


7. Despite really being tickled over getting a nice copy of the 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken card, this is my favorite pickup from two weekends ago.

That is all. Enjoy your weekend.