Trade Post... BA Benny (Mike) and Way off Base (Randy) and other random musings...

Hey, I've got a couple of trades to post here today... first of all is another GREAT trade with Mike over at BA Benny's blog. You all may be tired of hearing about how he's such an awesome card trader, but I'm not tired of trading with him! So, onto the loot... not only was Mike able to clear out about 35 cards from my want lists, he sent me some freakin' sweet Astros cards that I know I don't have!

Two on card autos of some former Astros prospects who didn't pan out to much (much like most Astros prospects sadly...) a sweet Berkman RC and some Bagwell and Lima-Time cards! Thanks Mike... I never made it to the post office yesterday, so sadly your cards are still on my desk. Tomorrow they will be mailed after work, guaranteed!

Next up is Randy from over at Way Off Base, we both cleared out some cards from each others want lists, but he also threw in some Astros my way:

Always great to see Nolan in a stack of cards. The Carlos Lee is a pretty sweet looking card in person (even though he's a defensive liability and about to keep some promising rookie from either playing LF or 1B the next two years... boo... hey Rangers, you want him? PLEASE?!?!?!) and I think I may have the rainbow of that Bud Norris now, including the auto although I could be wrong since there seems to be about 40 parallels of Bowman. Thanks Randy! Great cards! Thanks for the trade!

I had Friday off of work and so I spent some time getting a bit more organized. I took an empty 5000 count box and starting pouring in all the Astros that I have received via trade over the past almost year I've been running this blog as a card trading blog (it was utter non-sense before the switch I tell you, utter non-sense) and I managed to almost fill the thing up with just cards I've received from all you readers. Very grateful and for anyone who has traded with me, thanks a bunch. Also, the wife and I stopped at a new LCS we found from the TriStar show and picked up some 8-card and 4-card pages, as we found it hard to binder auto's, relics and the like. I now have all of those style cards in a binder rather than a box and let me tell you it looks pretty freakin' sweet. The only bad part is that the cards tend to slide out of the 8-card pages a bit too easily, that may be because I left them in the penny sleeves, but I'm paranoid about it... should I remove the penny sleeves?

Anyways, I'm one step closer to my goal of getting fully organized. My end game goal is to sort ALL of my cards by team and then by year & set. This way I can pull cards a bit more easier for team collectors. This does pose a problem for pulling cards from set want lists, but with checklists out there it shouldn't be too tough. This is going to be a long-term goal because I've got at least 40,000 cards here at the house and probably just as many in storage. I have a bunch of football and basketball I'm unsure what to do with. I don't want to just throw them away (blasphemy!) but I have no use for them, even ones that may have value. I just don't collect or care about them and don't really want to spend hundreds of dollars shipping them to someone. If any of you have some ideas, I'd love to know. If there are any Houston collectors (or collectors traveling through Houston) who just want to take them off my hands, I'd gladly give them to you once I get them all pulled from amidst my baseball cards...

This afternoon I'm headed over to an old college buddy of mine's place, Matt from Cardboard Conundrum, to trade some cards. He needs 2009 Allen and Ginter and I have it to trade away! Plus I have a Fukudome 2009 A&G Relic that I've been holding hostage from him! Muahahaha!

Finally, I participated in the Razor Letterman Case Break #2 over at Too Many Grandersons yesterday. I was a literally "last second" add-in for the festivities but I got in just in time. I made one trade before finalizing the 6 cards I got from the post and am VERY happy with the results. I think Dennis is going to post each person's loot, so I won't spoil that post for him but I will say that I ended up with some quality Astros cards. He's already said he may do a 3rd break, so if he does definitely get it. It's a great break because you really can go after the specific cards you want in the card draft, plus there's legit stars/semi-stars in the break: Posey, Castro, Wallace, Weiters and even Pete Rose. It has my stamp of approval! I know you were all waiting for that before participating! Plus you might get a chance to steal a 1/1 Ike Davis away from BA Benny, then can command a king's ransom in return!!!! Not that I would ever do such a thing... just sayin'... you could... but don't, it's bad karma...

Have a great week everyone! I have 4 packages going out in the mail tomorrow: BA Benny, Adam at ThoughtsAndSox, Drew from Drew's Cards and Jonathan from Australia. Adam and Jonathan are getting contest winnings, the other two are trade! Be on the look-out for those this week!