don't do what I did

 For literally years now, my dentist has been telling me to get my wisdom teeth out. I didn't want to do that. My thought process was "I'm going to keep my teeth for as long as possible" 

BIG mistake. My bottom left wisdom tooth broke off over the course of a few months and there was no pain at first so I figured the problem solved itself. 

I could not possibly have been more wrong. In February it got infected. I got medicine and it had stopped hurting, I had an appointment with the dental surgeon and I had him take out the other one that WAS hurting, on the right side. That one healed really quickly and essentially painlessly. I didn't need an ice pack and by day 3 I didn't even need pain medicine for it. 

Then the bottom left one got infected again, I took more medicine and had the appointment for March 16th to get it out. At that point I was actually looking forward to it because the two infections really were bad. 

Then I got it done...and it is the worst thing I've ever experienced. Because it was broken down to the gumline, he couldn't just grab it and pull it out. He had to use a drill to dig out all of the pieces, and it was excruciating. I've broken multiple bones including crushing part of my back, I've stabbed myself, I've drilled myself, I've burned myself...a couple years back they started doing a root canal before the numbing agent took affect...NONE of that compared to this. I've been living in constant pain 24/7/365 for 20+ years and this was by far the worst. 

It's been over a week now and it's not fully healed. There is still pain, although it's gotten to the point where I'm not bothering to take pain medicine anymore, I'm used to some pain. I can't guarantee I won't take some later though. 

My point is, if you need to have a tooth removed, do it BEFORE it breaks off. 

To make this somewhat relevant to Cardboard History, here are the three cards I have that are most tooth themed. Racing cards in 1996-97 got weird and in 1997 there was an entire shark themed set for some reason. These were the autograph cards from the set. 

a brief tale of redemption

 Back on February 4th, I purchased a box of 2024-25 Credentials from my local hobby shop. Each box promised one autograph but mine was in the form of a redemption. I entered the number into the Upper Deck website and waited for the card to arrive. Yesterday, it did. 

This is only my second hockey redemption since I began collecting the sport actively in January 2017. This is my 9th card of Gauthier but first autograph. It is only my 2nd Anaheim Ducks autograph also. 

Since I mostly do lower-end cards it's pretty rare for me to pull a redemption or an autograph in hockey. Looking at my collection records, it appears that I hadn't pulled a hockey autograph since March 2024, almost two years. 

While I am a set collector at heart and a fan of parallels (which this one is, by the way) it's still a nice feeling to pull something special for your collection. 

New People February 2026

 February was a weird month. I really enjoyed scanning and I did a lot of it - 1237 cards in total. This is despite the fact that I took roughly a week off surrounding the wisdom tooth removal which I had done on the 11th. 

I used the time I was recovering from that to FINALLY sort and post the Busch and Truck series cards into albums for each team on Cardboard History Gallery, something I've been wanting to do for a while but hadn't put aside any time for it. Now, finally, more than 7 years after I launched it, the Cardboard History Gallery is fully built! Now from here on, it's just maintaining with what I scan each month. 

For being the shortest month of the year, I scanned a LOT of new people...130. Of the 130 new people, 47 are women, which may be a record. I began scanning the PWHL cards and I finished the 2025 Donruss WNBA blaster I bought, which provided the majority of the women. 

Among the bigger names were Megan Keller, Olympic Golden Gold scorer, Marie-Philip Poulin and Nyara Sabally, the last New York Liberty player I was missing from my collection that got included in the 2025 Donruss checklist. 

I added 572 new cards in February, with almost 400 of them coming via trade on the Database. Most of them were people previously in my collection, but there were some new people too. 

I actually scanned almost all of them, too. Five of the hockey players arrived via trade on February 28th and I just didn't have time to scan them, and the Olympics athletes I was waiting until I had enough of the Topps Now cards to scan a full page of just them, and enough have arrived that that is now possible, so expect to see them in the March update.