Sunday, June 27, 2021

I couldn't let that happen

 We all know this past year the hobby has been crazy, and not in a good way. I refuse to play and pay the scalper game, so I got the lowest amount of cards during this season than any other season I've been collecting. I got some NHL and NASCAR before they disappeared, but I didn't get a single NBA card from the 2020-21 season. 

That was something that was making me very unhappy, so I decided to do something about it. Since I won't pay the high prices, I went to Ebay, searched by season and selected "lowest price  + shipping" and I found a seller with some cards for 99 cents with free shipping. Even that is too much, but at least I got a card from the season while the season was actually happening...just barely, as they arrived after the conference finals had already begun. 

I also picked up a card from the Upper Deck UD Portraits insert from this year since I didn't pull any in the single blaster I did of each series, and of course, it figures, the first year the Portraits insert is actually worth having is the first year I didn't get any. It was the only one the dealer had. 



This still isn't good...buying single cards from the current season is not fun at all. This is the wrong way to do the hobby, but missing the entire season is even worse. I went with the lesser of two evils. but I'm not happy about it. 

Friday, June 25, 2021

A second visit to Space Farms, this time we saw the animals!

 On Wednesday my brother took the day off from work so we could go to the Space Farms Zoo and Museum in New Jersey. Luckily, it was 64 degrees out so I was able to do a lot more walking than I could when we went in September...and we saw everything this time! I took over 800 photos but I'm not going to post them all here...just the favorites. It's still a lot, and some tell a story, so stay tuned...

Normally, I post adventure pictures in roughly chronological order, but there were a couple photos I want to really highlight because I like them so much.

This goat climbed right up the fence to see if I had any food. You can feed the goats and some of the other animals. Once they determined we didn't have food they lost interest pretty quickly.
a lemur
The first time I've ever seen a peacock with it's tail feathers open. Both of them there were open at the same time!

Now, the rest of the photos in chronological order. Most of them speak for themselves.






Arctic Fox

They did not try to sell me insurance.
Not sure if the geese are considered part of the zoo or they just showed up. The geese and ducks wander the park. 



bear scratching his back
Prairie dogs!

The bear is sitting in the drinking troth! 







The lioness got up, stretched, went over to the lion and poked at him. He got up and just moved a few feet away. It was funny. They are just like regular cats, only bigger. 
a sika deer in the process of standing up



The fallow deer eat all their grass and ground covering, including the roots, meaning they have the only bare enclosure there. According to the sign they are the only deer that do that. 





elk
The only zoo I know that has a woodchuck exhibit. According to the sign, they are edible. Yikes! 




Funning watching this alligator get out of the pool


the Baboons are former lab animals that they gave a home to

I should have brought an old nickel to compare. 

After finishing the animals section (mostly) we finished the builds I was too exhausted to do in September. Tractors are first...

The Space family's wagon they used when it was a dairy farm.




Even though I did the car rooms last time, you know I'm going to do them again, every time I go there! 









this is actually a baby alpaca, taken out the window in the hallway that leads to the carriage room. In that room is one of my new favorite exhibits there, which I feel the story is worth reading so it's posted here in full. 
















My brother makes a rare appearance on Cardboard History, this really shows how big the wagon actually is. 

After the wagon room, which is very dark and hard to photograph, we did the tool room...
The large bucket was carved from a single tree!




It's Hammer Time.
A horse treadmill! I had read about these but had never seen one.
A dog powered treadmill was news to me however! According to the label it was used for churning butter and dates to the 1860s.

After the tool room was the toy room, which was pretty cool. 






I actually caught this bird in mid-blink



Baby snakes on the plinth
Baby goat
Not in the museum, but along the road. That part of northern New Jersey is mostly farms. I love seeing cows and this shot was nice and clear so it gets posted.
They do have a billboard telling you where to turn but I didn't see it on the way out. (we had GPS so we were fine)
As much as I love the cows, my favorite side of the road spotting was this El Camino! 
As we went by Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, a military C130 came in for a landing. 

It was a great trip, we really had a lot of fun. The museum is packed...it has more artifacts than any other museum I've been to. Proportionally even more than the Museum of Natural History. The amazing thing is that some of the artifacts were actually passed down through the family that runs it, 
the only museum I know of where that's the case with pre Columbian artifacts. 

Because we had done most of the museum section already, we saw all this in only about 3 and a half hours time.

I do have all the photos, and a few videos which I can't figure out how to post here, up on my website here: Space Farms 2021

Thanks for reading!