State of my Life and the Blog plus a Group Break from Cardboard Collections

For those that are keeping track, my posting and commenting have been sporatic.  I have done very little reaching out to instigate trades but have had a couple people recently offer to send me some wants - Thanks!!!  I shared a few weeks back that things were changing the in ARPSmith household and I thought I would provide an update.

As you may recall, I got a new job that requires me to relocate about 100 miles away from where I currently live.  My new job started almost immediately so I have been living in a Residence Inn during the week and going home on the weekends for the last 6 or 7 weeks.  We put our house on the market and have been looking for a new one.  This leaves my wife at home with a full time job, 3 kids (including a baby) and with the need to keep the house spotless in case it needs to be shown to a prospetive buyer.  She has been handling it better than I could have imagined - she is amazing!

As of today, our old house is in escrow, we have a new house in escrow and the new job is going very well.  We are due to move out around the 26th of June and move into the new house somewhere between the 27th and July 3rd.  (For those of you that might think of mailing things to me, it might be good to hold off after the 20th of June - I will try to send out the new address once we are settled).  The new house is great, it is actually bigger, on a bigger lot with a pool (which we didn't have at our old house).  It is older and has some updating to do but overall we are very happy.  The prices of the houses are similar and with lower interest rates we should have a decent reduction in the mortgage.  It also has 5 bedrooms meaning I will have a room to myself for my sports stuff and card collection!

I will be packing up my cards in the very near future in anticipation of the move but should be back up and going again in mid July.  I scanned a bunch of trade material last weekend in hopes of catching up on my trade posts but doubt there will be much else being posted until I am settled.  I also suspect my collecting budget will go down as our plan it to have my wife take at least a year off of work in our new location.  I am excited about this change despite the lower funding for my collecting.  I hope to turn that into some better content on the blog where I can spend more time dreaming up solid post ideas as opposed to trolling for good deals on cards.

If you made it this far, I am impressed, thanks for reading.  Now onto the good stuff - cards!  Some of my favorite group breaks are the ones put on by Colbey over at Cardboard Collections as he usually picks out some unique boxes that provide lots of new cards to my Giants collection.  This break happened a little ways back and featured boxes of 2000 Topps Gold Label, 1998 Paramount and 1998 Pacific Online.

This time around I almost passed it up as the 2000 Topps Gold Label product only contains Barry Bonds as a Giant and I already had the Class 1.  But ultimately the big gaps I had in my checklist for the 2 Pacific products made me decide to jump in and I am very glad I did.

First up were the cards I received from the Paramount box:

I was very happy to score 8 different Giants base cards and a Robb Nen copper parallel. All of these cards were needs from me - I actually didn't have any cards from this set until the break. I like the photography on these cards, pretty much all action shots with no borders and the nameplate at the bottom doesn't detract much from the picture.

Next up is the Pacific Online:

 I scored 8 base cards, again all needs for my Giants collection.  Today the entire Online theme seems a little dated but I am guessing back in 1998 it impressed some people.

In addition to the 8 base cards, I scored 8 parallels.  These came one per pack and it seemed like only a few teams were getting any and I was very happy to be one of the lucky ones.  The difference between these cards and the base are different colored foil and the back has a code that is supposedly unique to each card.  I read that this code could possibly have won you a more rare parallel.

Finally the Topps Gold.  Pretty early on in the break a Class 2 Bonds came up and I was super happy.  I really wasn't expecting much, if anything from the product, especially a card I needed.  Imagine my joy when the Class 3 popped up shortly thereafter:

That completed the base set for me and made this break more than worthwhile.  Then came the last group of packs and look what came out:

This is a die cut, Class 2 parallel card numbered 098/100.  The card looks great in person and was the pull of the group break.  These older serial number cards sell for a pretty good price and have high book values ($60 for this Bonds). I of course will not be selling it but adding it to the Giants collection - a card I never thought I would have in my collection.

I had the Twins as my second team and scored a small stack of including 10 Online cards, 4 Paramounts and a Gold Label, if interested let me know.

As usual, Colbey through in a few extras into my stack:

Thanks Colbey for the great break.  You mentioned you were probably going to take a little bit of a break but I will be on the lookout for the next one.  Thanks!