A Good Home

 Cats. My wife and I have two cats. 

The "Cat Cave" is meant for one cat occupancy.

Would I call myself a cat person. No.

Holiday. Her favorite follow on Twitter is "cats in places where cats shouldn't be" https://twitter.com/timelinecats

Do they fit my busy teaching and coaching lifestyle? Yes.  

Hugo. Always the helper cat. 

Neither of them demand much attention and if I give them a clean litter box and few cups of food we can head out for the weekend knowing they'll manage just fine.

I have 11+ more years in public education, when my retirement plan fully vests, and then it's dog time. I will work in retirement, but my priorities will be different and some lucky shelter dog will be given a very good home. 

I follow a couple local pet shelters online and my timeline is often full of man's best friend. I'm not sure why I do that to myself. 

Speaking of shelters... My favorite disc golf company will release a new disc in March, named after their shelter rescue Binx, the one eyed cat. The stamp on the disc features Binx and part of the proceeds go an animal shelter. 

Do I need more discs? My wife would say, "No. No, you do not." 

Will I be buying this disc?  Yes, yes I will. It will find a good home in my disc golf bag and get plenty of use this summer. 

Lastly, a bubble mailer from the west coast arrived last week. Fuji reached out and asked if I still still took up residence in P-town. Naturally!

A hefty stack of VOGELMONSTERS were found in my mailbox shortly thereafter and you know they have found a wonderfully good home. 

Fuji, thanks for the cards and for giving me something to blog about. 

Have a great weekend!

Game Plan for 2022 and the Joy of a Completed Set

 It was about three weeks ago when I posted about my futile attempts to secure the last card to the 1986 Larry Fritsch Negro League Stars set. I had preferred to trade for a copy, but after a couple weeks of crickets I finally broke down and purchased the final card from Ebay.

Currently, the only set I'm working on building is the Conlon Collection. I haven't scratched a card off my want list for that monster in over two years. So maybe "working on" isn't the right verb-age there.  

I'm not sure what set I should build next, but I would love to try another Negro League set or maybe a HOF player set, similar to Panini Cooperstown back in 2012 and 2013. Maybe Fanatics, who recently bought Topps, will have some new ideas in the works and we'll have something different on the horizon. 

In other news, I've collected Dan Vogelbach cards for eleven years now. I know, right? Time sure does go by fast. For 2022 I've decided to focus on filling in any gaps from the previous years AND only add one base card of the Vogelmonster from each set.  I did a quick calculation and 84% (604/721) of my Vogelbach cards are parallels.  My favorite player has averaged about 11 different unique cards each year. I'm done with parallels... you know, unless it's from 2011-2021. 

I hope everyone's new year is off to a great start! Thanks for reading!

An Auto of Randy Johnson?

 I celebrated a birthday a couple of weeks ago with my family and my sister surprised me with a nice little stash of autographed baseball cards. 

All of my autographs and relic cards are housed in top loaders within a couple of sizeable "shoeboxes" within my man room. Up first are a couple of infield prospects who didn't pan out. 

Neither Greg Smith nor Gary Scott had much MLB staying power, but Scott hit 0.366 during Spring Training in 1991 and had all of Chicago dubbing him the next coming of Ron Santo. 

This is my second autograph of Turk Wendell, who I have privately nicknamed "Turk the Quirk." 

Wendell who turned in a pretty fair major league career was more known for his quirky superstitions when we was first brought up. On my other card, which is also a Cubs card, he inscribed "Mets" under his signature. I'm glad he scribbled in "Cubs" this time around!

Tommy Hottovy did not play for the Cubs, but he is the current pitching coach for my favorite team. 

Up next are autographs of four different players with whom I share a surname: Greg Olson, Matt Olson, Garrett Olson and Gregg Olson. 

I have player collections of Greg and Gregg, but this is only my second card of Garrett and his first autograph. I've been known to snag Matt Olson base cards at shows on the cheap when I run across them, and this is my second autograph of his. 

Randy "Big Unit" Johnson was always one of my favorite players. This is not that Randy Johnson. 

This Randy Johnson played 204 games for the Braves in the early stages of the 1980s. Joke's on me! 😂 Good one, Jane!

This was my favorite card of the lot, and honestly it wasn't it even close. 

Julio Franco had one of those batting stances every kid wanted to imitate and it's shown on this card. Additionally, Julio's signature is beautiful and he's another one of those players who holds a footnote in my memory banks as one of the oldest to ever play baseball at its highest level.

Julio was actually my answer to a trivia question last month, albeit the wrong answer. "In 2004, this player became the oldest major leaguer to win a batting title." Julio hit 0.309 in 2004 as a 45 year old. FORTY-FIVE! But, alas, he did not win the batting title that year. (The correct answer is a slugger who is currently on his 10th year on the current HOF ballot.)

Thanks for the great stack of autographs, Jane!