Cards for Christmas and a major milestone

 Sorry I'm a few days late in getting this posted, but once again my family came through in a big way with cards for Christmas this year. I know that Christmas is traditionally the biggest day of the year for me in adding new cards to my collection and I've been working hard on documenting them since that day, although working hard is a bit of a misnomer...it's a lot of fun, and it's not hard to do...just takes time. 

Like I said...big way! 

Now, let's see some of the hits...

When I bought myself a box of 2023 Donruss in the spring my card I pulled from this insert was missing the relic piece...I joke that I pulled race used air. 

All in all, I got 798 new cards...at least. I know that many for sure, but some of my 2010-11 Score carda are from the Glossy parallel, which I didn't know when I was documenting them in my paper listing. I thought they were ALL glossy until I had some in hand together and realized one version was a parallel. And since you can't tell from scans, I have to wait and see which version I had previously until I can get them in hand again and check. 

The Flight set is one of the coolest sets in a long time. It's unfortunately small at only 70 cards and 20 of them are short printed so I didn't get a complete set, but I did get a stack of duplicates. This card is the Major Milestone. And when I say Major Milestone, it's my 200,000th overall card to enter my collection since I began collecting in 1988! At least I am considering it as such because that's what my current records show. I'm in the middle of proofing my collection charts and hopefully will have the correct, full number early next year, but for now I consider this #200000. Even when I get to have the full number, I'll still consider this one the milestone card because it's the one I thought was the milestone at the time. 

This is a really cool card and the photo doesn't do it justice. 

The scan shows it's brightness much better! They do these Highlighters inserts in 5 colors, and I've already secured an orange and a blue on COMC. The green, my favorite color, seems to be the rarest as they only have two for sale and both well over what I want to pay for a single card. There is also a purple version. COMC can't tell the difference between pink and purple but they are easily discernable. They have them both listed as pink. 

More clear plastic fun. 

From my MVP box I pulled an MVP Talent Colors & Contours parallel that is SN 20/20 on the back. Pretty rare to get a numbered card from MVP.  

This is, I think, my favorite card I got on Christmas. I have always been fascinated with Zeppelins, airships, blimps and the like. 

I will end with this Checkers parallel from 2021 Chronicles...which is extra cool because it's SN 06/49, which was Mark's # from 1988-2006 including 1999 when this photo was taken. 

I hope you all had as excellent a day as I did! 

Blue Angels, Red Arrows and F-35 Lightning Demo Team

How was your day today? Mine was spectacular! The New York International Air Show is at Stewart Airport in Newburgh. NY this weekend, and I won't be going- for my family to attend would be $750, it's crazy expensive. However, today the Red Arrows and F-35 Lightning Demo team took a flight to the State of Liberty today. The Blue Angels were supposed to join them but cancelled due to plane maintenance so I didn't expect to see them. I was wrong.

My mom and I took a trip to Newburgh, and parked in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. I had recently gotten a gift card for the store, so I figured, that would work well. The B&N in Newburgh is right below the flight path for the long runway at Stewart...in theory, they would go right by us when they returned. That's exactly what happened!

The Red Arrows took one circle around and then landed, but the F-35s did some stunt practicing!

Those little dots in the middle of the image? Those are the F35s. They were high, they were fast, and hard to get a good photo of...but, you know, I managed to.

My favorite photo of the entire day, and I took over 400!

So after they all landed, we went into B&N, then the plan was to head to Roy Rodgers for lunch...but I was already more than an hour past my medicine schedule and my head was pounding, so Arby's, which is much closer, was chosen as lunch. (The fact that you have to drive right past the airport to get there didn't hurt, although it turned out to be a dud- I didn't see any of the Red Arrows, F35s or Blue Angels on the ground.

As we're driving back after lunch, I hear the roar of jet engines over the car. It's an unmistakable sound, and I love that sound, even though it's much louder than anything I usually like.
I look straight up out the roof and what do I see, but the Blue Angels practicing their stunt flying! I have never been happier that our car has a sunroof! We pull back into the same lot, and watch the Blue Angels practice for over an hour.

 My best Blue Angel shot

I know the pictures are not that great...they were moving quickly, and up high- and my camera is not that great, so I did the best I could. Even though my pictures do not compare to how incredibly awesome they were in person, this is something that I will never forget. It's not the first time I've seen stunt flying- I saw a single fighter jet doing stunts at an air show in the mid-1990s- this was the most amazing, spectacular thing I've ever seen involving an airplane...or airplanes.

It's unbelievably awesome to see these pilots, the best of the best from two nations-doing their thing.

I wish I could have captured it on film how great it really was. I'm so thrilled I got to experience it...see it, hear it, even smell it, because they were close enough that I could smell the jet fuel! (a smell I like, by the way)

I also hit 20,000 photos taken on the year today...I blew past my personal record for most photos in a year months ago, and I'm just adding to it all the time. I will never top 2019 in photos.

Random Scan Post V: The Scans Strike Back

I kept the 10 posts per month streak going another month. Yay for me. Enjoy the random cards? Yay for you!

 With my new scanner I can mix the Stadium Club cards in with the other cards, something I have not been able to do since...hmm...2012? I can't remember. RIP to Jerome Kersey, who was killed by a blog clot following knee surgery.

 The sky blue Kings jerseys were cool.

 You don't see people wear #52 too often. 1990-91 Fleer is another set I set aside to do later, and that later is now.

 I bought this set complete in 2013, and I'm pretty sure this is the first card of it to get scanned. It's from Panini Canada, and is bi-lingual.

 1994-95 Hoops is one of my all-time favorite sets, driven mostly, but not fully, on nostalgia. It's a quality design, and is one of the very few sets to include the player's jersey number on the back. They also have full career statistics including playoffs, it's probably the best card back in NBA history.

 This one comes from a yet-to-be-blogged trade with Kenny/Zippy Zappy. It's an insert from an Ebisu Muscats set, which may or may not have been published by BBM. It has the same texture as the BBM cards I have...

This is an insert, as I said, but the base cards are all in bikinis. Not something you would expect from an American music group, but I am not going to complain!

 Funny story about this one. Motorsports Modelcards was a company in business from 1991-92, or perhaps 1994, depending on how you want to look at it. The company also made Blue Ridge decals for scale models. and some of the decal sets came with cards. I got both the decals and the card sets in either 2004 or 2005, but I didn't notice until last week that the cards are different! I always thought, since the pictures were the same, that they were just the regular cards put into the decals. Earlier in May, I looked through my decal stash for the first time in about 10 years, and I looked at the cards again. As it turns out, the cards ARE different! The card number is different and they have a line of text about looking for the full sets.

As far as I know they are undocumented anywhere on the internet, except by me.

 This card was actually scanned on the last day of scanning with scanner #4. But it came out awful so I set it aside. I finally got around to scanning it with scanner #5 and pulled off the good scan on May 28th...original, bad and long deleted scan made mid-February.

Around 2015 I bought a mixed lot of cards in a Facebook group, which is pretty unusual, and the seller padded out the box with a big stack of 2014 Prestige football. The foil name is easy to read in hand, but not in scans, it's Shane Vereen.

You had to know there would be a Star Wars card in here at some point, right? From my favorite Star Wars set, Galactic Files.

Sets in my Collection #29: 1952 Topps Wings

Been a while since I've posted in this series. I wrote this post in 2015, though I did have to modify some of it to reflect posts I wrote and published long after I originally wrote this one.

Now we have a run of some of my all-time favorite sets. Topps really hit their stride in the early-mid 50s, and the next three Topps sets (Including this one) all ranked highly in my countdown of favorite Non-Sports sets, that I published in January.

Topps did an entire series of sets, over several years, on vehicles. I don't have all of them in my collection yet, but the three I do have are favorites.

The earliest was 1952's Topps Wings, sometimes known as Wings: Friend or Foe. This was a 200 card set, in the slightly larger than current standard size that was standard at the time.

I have an amazing 179 of 200 cards in the set, or 89.5% completion! Once again, I happened to be in the right place at the right time to get these. With 21 cards missing from my collection, and none of them particularly rarer than any others, completing this set is an attainable goal of mine. Someday. Unlike sports cards, with more popular players being harder to find, and none of the cards short-printed like in the next set, it makes none of the cards impossible. Non-Sports cards also don't have the burden of "Rookie Cards" to make them unobtainable.

Since I love the set, and since I have so many of them, I am going to post more than one front scan.

#5

#7. The very first plane I was ever inside- parked!- was one of these at an airshow in 1993.

#14

#19. The set also included helicopters.

#32. I believe this was the first vintage card of any sort I ever added to my collection, circa 1994 or 1995. It was either this or a card from the next set in the series.

#71

#120

And finishing up with a card back. The cards had the standard light brown cardboard for the backs.

This set is commonly referred to as "Wings : Friend or Foe" but that is not actually the name- the name is just Wings, although Friend or Foe appears on every card.