Snow at 94°

 My brother and I made a very rare trip to our local Wal-Mart on Saturday, which was an unpleasant 94° out for. My Wal-Mart usually doesn't have a good card selection and theirs is even smaller now than it was last time I visited, right around Christmas time. 

I didn't walk away empty handed, though. I got a blaster of Hoops, or so I thought. It was actually Hoops Winter, which is basically a reissue of regular Hoops but with snow added digitally to each card and gold foil instead of silver. As much as I dislike cards with messed with photos, I actually like these a lot. I've always loved snow, and they still show the real picture- mostly. They fall right in the spot of "messed with but whimsical enough that I like them" and I am not unhappy that I didn't notice the Winter label on the box. 

An even better aspect of it, is that I didn't have a single one of the Winter cards. I had opened 3 packs of regular Hoops. No duplicates! That's always a good thing and never a guarantee with Panini which tends to have the cards always come out of the packs in the same order, including inserts and parallels. 

You can see the white snow all over the design here, and with the snow bank on the top. I like how you can still see the real photo, just with the snow added to it. 

Because getting cards has been fairly rare recently, some of the veteran players appear in my collection for the first time from this blaster. This is Peyton Watson. 

I especially like the cards that show alternate uniforms. There are so many these days- each NBA team wears at least 4 uniforms every year, and at least one of them is exclusive to that season, so there are a lot of jersey designs that don't appear in my collection...and may not appear on any cards at all. I don't even know. 

Al Horford has been in the NBA since 2007 and finally got to celebrate a championship this season. 

I pulled both cards of phenom, #1 overall pick and Rookie of the Year winner Victor Wembanyama, my first two cards of him in NBA uniform, and 2nd and 3rd cards overall. The base rookie, shown second here, is actually an error as it's missing some foil from the final A in his last name, but odds are it will stay in my regular collection and not get moved to the Error collection. While Wal-Mart had 2 or 3 more blasters, I don't really have the money in the budget to get them. 

The top card of him is from the Tribute subset, which really doesn't need to exist. Just an excuse by Panini to get the superstars into the base set twice, and keeping active players from getting a single card. 

The inserts are also snowy, although a little hard to see on the Arriving Now of Anthony Black. The Holofoil parallel of Maxwell Lewis is more easily seen. 

I still have one pack left to open, but this was the only parallel I've gotten so far, a purple foil parallel. Personally I'd much rather have parallels than inserts. 

I also pulled the one per blaster autograph or relic, and it is my first and so far only card of Jaquez Jr.

Finally, here is a Winter card and a standard Hoops card showing the difference. 

Sometimes dreams DO come true

 There is one constant in all of my life, and that is my love of cars. I don't really know why cars resonate with me so much, but they do, and have my entire life. 

For many years I have had the dream of being able to enter a car show, not just spectate. I've been attending car shows since I was a little kid being pushed in a stroller, but they actually caused me some anguish too, as I've gotten older and my health has gotten worse. 

I am not able to drive or work on old cars. It seemed like I would never be able to achieve that dream. I thought it would be always out of reach, that I would always be on the outside looking in. 

Until tonight! 

My brother needed a new car, and ended up buying a 1989 Cadillac Coupe DeVille off one of his coworkers, and he began driving it today. Today also happened to be the weekly cruise-in in Hyde Park, NY, and we took the Cadillac...and entered it! While it's not "my" car, I still got to go and be a part of the show. 

It was truly a dream come true! 

Me with the car

Me putting the show registration under the windshield wiper

Our car, in the car show for the first time! 

Seeing it in the background of other car photos is still a thrill...and I have to be honest, I aimed it specifically so it would be. 

There it is again!

Looking at some of the rest of the show while standing behind the Cadillac

After the awards were announced the cars left in droves, lol. We stayed until 8:30 but there were few cars left and the bugs were starting to decide I was a good place to land and walk around so we left too.

By the time we got done in the store there were very few cars left in the show. 

Here are a couple of my favorite cars that weren't ours

1940 Plymouth pickup, very rare

1948-52 Ford F-3, I don't know which year exactly. The hood design tells what year is which but I can't remember which year is which design.

and it's matching trailer

Here are all the pictures I took from tonight: June 12th, 2024 Hyde Park Cruise

The plan is to be a regular at our two local cruises. But this will always be the first, and I already know I'm going to wake up tomorrow and wonder if this really happened or if it was just an awesome dream! 

New People Scanned in May 2024

 It was a fairly light month of scanning, as I got more in to the scale modeling aspect of my life as the temperatures warmed up. I scanned 378 cards, 26 of which were new people. 

15 of the 26 arrived to me from my friend that sends me his duplicates, the source off all the football and baseball in this month's batch as well as a couple of the hockey, including the Bourque.