Topps Giant Vintage Pickups

I thought I was in my "new normal" but over the last couple weeks I have been in a little funk. 

My job has been very busy, in addition to my normal work (now being done virtually) I am also on my company's task force to help set up new guidelines on when and how we will emerge from this pandemic and start repopulating our physical offices.   I am grateful to be working but this task force work is requiring me to work until 6 or 7 PM a couple nights a week (the joy of working in the Midwest for a West Coast based company!).

It isn't unusual for me to work long hours, I am actually probably working a bit less when you take into account that I don't have to travel and be away from home.  The challenge has been the fact that I work all day in my basement room, the same room that I use for my card collecting and blogging.  Initially I enjoyed being surrounded in my collection all day but lately I don't want anything to do with my card room after work hours, hence little time with my hobby and no blogging.

I decided to take last Friday off to give myself a 4 day weekend to separate and recharge.  I also hoped to pound out a few blog posts and get back in the routine.  Good news, it was a great break from work and I feel recharged.  Bad news, stayed mostly away from the card room and no blog posts were crafted.

Today I got some cards in the mail (by the time you read this it will have been yesterday) and I immediately wanted to share them in a blog post.  Don't know why, it is nothing epic or earth-shattering.  I was just excited to share them.  Hopefully this starts a trend, we'll see.

I was checking out a couple of card collecting groups on Facebook and saw someone with a big stack of 1964 Topps Giant cards.  This is an insert set I recently started collecting by picking up a big lot from a different guy on Facebook.   I shot the guy a PM with my want list and he responded back quickly that I was down the line and he was going in the order that people contacted him.  I figured I was too late and forget about it.

A day or two later he hit me back up with a PM and a picture of 14 cards that I needed for my set.  I told him I was interested and he him me back with an offer of $60 delivered and I didn't even counter.  If you aren't familiar with the set, it is 60 cards in length.  The cards are pretty affordable with a couple exceptions.  There are 7 short prints and 2 of them are stars in Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays.  There are also Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron in the set.  Most of the other stars aren't too bad to pick up so my love of insert sets, vintage and affordability collided and this is now a set I am going after.

With these 14 cards that you see below, and 3 cards on their way from COMC, my want list is down to 12 cards including all 5 of the expensive cards I called out above.  I am sure I will slowly pick those off to complete the set and I already have these oversized cards sitting in a binder in 4-pocket pages waiting to be finished off. 

Here are the cards I just picked up:

A Pair of HOF Pitchers

A Pair of HOF Braves

Hoot and Killer

Cha-Cha and Yaz to finish off a HOF run

A Pair of Great and Underrated Hitters

The Friend is One of Seven SPs

Finishing it Off with 2 More SPs

I am very happy with these pick ups and happy to share them with you. Hope to be back with some more cards to share soon.