Inundated with Nolan Ryan refractor autos!

Today was one of my biggest card maildays ever, thanks in part to a couple big eBay purchases arriving at the same time.

A year ago, I bought myself a 2005 Retired Nolan Ryan auto as a "wedding gift" to myself. This year, I treated myself to a "1st anniversary gift" by upgrading to the /25 refractor parallel of that same card.

Perhaps the fact that it's "been claimed for another set" according to the slab helped confuse people keep the price reasonable. It was just a blaster more than I paid for the non-refractor auto. My plan is to sell the old one, maybe even make a profit on the deal, with luck. As I've said before, while I'm a fan of all autos from the Retired line of cards, the refractors look especially great. So I couldn't resist putting in a respectable bid for this one, and ended up winning with exactly my highest bid (much less than $250, btw).. so you know it came down to the wire.

And check this out! That wasn't the only Topps Retired Signature Edition Nolan Ryan refractor auto I received today!

Yep, I got the 2004 Retired version, too! That's a big score for my 2004 Retired Refractors project. I had been kicking myself for passing up a "countered best offer" a few months ago for one of these. But now I'm glad I had restraint back then, because I was able to land this one for significantly less. (Still not cheap, don't get me wrong.) I think the 8.5 grade (a low grade by modern card standards) helped keep the price down. But truth is, I don't want any of my 2004 Retired's to be graded (I like them all in the "uncirculated" cases), so I plan to jailbreak it anyways (and slyly slip it back into an uncirculated case next time I find one with a loose sticker). This seller also had a few other big cards I need for my 2004 Retired project, namely refractors of Hank Aaron and Brooks Robinson, but they both ended up out of my range. Oh well. Patience is key.

And a third eBay package that showed up today was a thousand penny sleeves. I'm a sleeves guy, not a binder guy, so I go through a lot of them. What was especially cool about this purchase is I made it just yesterday afternoon. The seller happened to be in the next town over (Vancouver, WA), and was prompt about getting it out the door, so I got next-day delivery. Hard to beat that.

It's funny because the 2004 Retired Nolan actually came from close by, too: Portland suburb Lake Oswego. But I guess the seller wasn't quite as on his game as the sleeves guy, as it ended up taking 4 days to show up.

One more card delivery arrived today, this a trade package from my pal Nate at Big 44 Sport Cards.

Nice David Wells swatch /175 as a Padre! A Giancarlo Bowman RC! A gold Pat Neshek! And a Rod Carew #'d /1000. Thanks, Nate! Great stuff!

That's it for today. I'm gonna officially cut off the entry period for my big anniversary contest.. right.. NOW! However, one last chance: the first person to identify the bonus 80s song tease at the end of this MP3 cover of "Under the Milky Way" and post the artist/title of the song in the comments of this post will get 2 bonus entries. It's a recording I did with my "band" (actually it's just me on all instruments, plus my bud Karie helping out with vocals). I think it turned out really well! I'm putting up a new song every Friday of 2015 (follow us on Twitter!), and June is "80s Month", partially inspired by the release of Archives. Last week was a cover of "Safety Dance". Haven't recorded the song for this coming week, but hopefully I get something worked out in time.

Tomorrow I'll get all the contest entries sorted out in a randomized order and work toward finding some winners.
Thanks for swinging by!