The Harrowing Adventures of a Nerd Week Contest Winner!

A winner is me..

The prize for winning The Junior Junkie’s Nerd Week Contest arrived yesterday, and I nearly paid for it with my life!  That’s an exaggeration, but the box was huge (over $18 to ship!), and I was on my way out, so I stupidly decided to carry it over to the parents’ place with me.  Conditions were also way worse than I was expecting, and my main shoes are super old generic Shape-Ups types with no traction left on them.

Basically, it was a recipe for disaster, and, long story short, disaster indeed struck.  I ended up crashing and burning pretty bad on hidden ice patch close to halfway between here and there.  I hit the back of my head on the sidewalk, but I popped back up pretty quickly without difficulty, no wooziness or anything that would indicate being concussed.  A couple of folks I had passed a short ways back quickly came to my assistance helped me get my bearings and everything I dropped.  Very grateful to them for that.

The pain was mostly gone within a couple of blocks of continuing on my way, and any lingering head pain has minimal and infrequent, though I will get checked out if the random, brief little twinges of discomfort persist.  I finally managed to make it over to the parents’ place without further incident, and after getting cleaned up, I was finally ready to cut the tape and dig into the box!

The box in question..

And so I dug, and dug, and dug some more!  There was a LOT more in there than the DVD.  Are you ready to be as blown away by the thought and effort and generosity that went into this amazing prize package as we (the parents were very impressed too) were?

The note..

Here’s the handwritten note TJ sent, congratulating me and running down the contents.

The original prize..

Of course, the DVD was in there.  Say what you will about Family Guy in general, but the Star Wars specials are always straight up inspired.  Gonna enjoy this. 🙂

Are you ready for some football?!

I’m taking this back to the parents’ place next time I’m over, because it is small and plushy and can safely be thrown around over there during the rare lulls when we aren’t skewering anything and everything on TV MST3K-style or talking about generally geeky and/or nerdy things when dad, my little brother, and me are all there at the same time.

Original art by Jason Goad..

I love art.  I am an artist (allegedly), after all.  But I can’t afford much original art beyond relatively cheap sketch cards very often, so this is was a super awesome thing to find in the box!  It’s a fantastic piece and I absolutely love it! 😀

A trio of CDs..

Styx and The Who will definitely get some airplay around here, and I’m not quite as down on Dane Cook as most, so I’ll be giving that a listen at some point as well.

Under the CDs, you can sorta see the corner of one of the pair of monstrously huge Pinnacle screwdown holders.  I swear I took a picture of them along with everything else, but I can’t find it.  Anyway, they are so ridiculously thick and heavy that they might legitimately be able to stop a bullet.

St. Joseph’s Prosperity Bean..

I didn’t know what this was because I’m a lazy millennial, but mom seemed to recognize it and thought it was pretty cool.  I read a little bit about them when I got back to my place.  Very interesting, and I will be keeping it on me.

Mardi Gras beads!

I’ve always wanted to go to Mardi Gras (because I’m sure my antisocial arse being around hundreds of thousands of loud, crazy, drunk people for an extended period of time would go just peachy), but thanks to TJ, a little bit Mardi Gras has come to the frozen wastes of the Midwest.  He notes they’re the real deal in the above letter, so I can’t help but wonder what he had to do to acquire them…

Anyway, I’m just glad he sent beads and not the terrifying New Orleans Pelicans King Cake Baby.

The last thing you see before you die..

There aren’t enough NOPE gifs in the world… My apologies for the impending nightmares, ladies and gentlemen.  We should probably just move on with a quickness.

Various Asian candies..

There were four different things in pouches, and my trying them out went badly.  I definitely haven’t acquired these tastes yet.  The Lychee was the best in a walk, and it kinda tasted like accidentally getting fruit-scented soap in your mouth.  But the experience was still worth the while and very much-appreciated.

You know, we’ve gotten this far and haven’t even made it to the cards yet!

Ah, there we go..

But they were there, and they were many.  I tore off the old shipping labels on the outer boxes before I took the pictures, just to be safe.

So many cards!

The top box had tons of Ryne Sandbergs, Mark Graces, and a random assortment of other Cubbies.  The bottom had miscellaneous non-sport stuff and some unopened junkwax era packs, most of which I will be drawing on the backs of at later dates.  Twas also home to the blue and silver beads.

The completely full box was bananas, with large amounts of 2012 Panini Golden Age, 2011 Panini Americana, and 2012 Topps Summer Olympics, as well as some Goodwin Champions, Allen & Ginter inserts, more random non-sport and entertainment cards,  and the occasional hockey card.

The big pack sittling in the middle of everything is a pack of 1986 Donruss All-Stars, which may be posted on A Pack to be Named Later at some point, and the rest will get a post of their own here once I’ve scanned some of them.

Since around half of the set was there, I’m definitely going to chase the Summer Olympics set now.  The other big stacks didn’t have enough for me to justify it, but I’m keeping a Single Page of both Goodwin Champions and Golden Age, as well as the vintage-ish Star Wars cards, and probably a fair amount of other things.

My canvas..

Finally, this card not part of the prize package.  This card is for a commission.  On the back of this 1989 Topps Traded Ken Griffey Sr. card, I will be drawing Ken Griffey Jr. from his RC, the very next card in the same set.  I loved the idea and will get to work on it as soon as my body stops being so creaky and achy.

For this commission I was paid $12, and even the money was worth mentioning.  Check it out!

$2 bill!

Yes, that is a two-dollar bill.  I’m pretty sure haven’t seen one of those since back in the late-1990s when I got one back as change at one of the last card shows held at the local mall.

The flipside..

Easily the coolest looking piece of US currency that still spends.

There you have it.  This has to be in the running for the single greatest card blog prize package ever made.  The amount of time, thought, effort, and money that must have went into this making it possible boggles the mind.  I know TJ puts a ton of effort into his collection and his posts, so maybe it comes as no surprise he’d go all-out on a prize package, but I am still beyond honored and humbled to be its recipient.

Thank you, TJ!  And thanks to everyone for stopping by!

It was worth the pain…

 

Sketch Cards!

I’m back, but still not quite all the way.  Well, I might never be all the way back as a collector of sports cards, but that is neither here nor there.  I’ll be returning to irregularly regular blogging sometime in August I think.  Just trying to get all my trading affairs in order and sent, and they won’t be sent till then, cuz I am broker than broke.  I won’t go hungry, but I’ve got literally $20 for the rest of the month, chiefly because I had to finally get a new recliner.  Mine completely fell apart at the very beginning of the month, so I spent the entire 4th of July weekend marooned at the parents, and hit every place that sells used furniture in town during that time, finally finding a great new arrival on the 5th.  Seriously, it’s like a freaking throne that reclines, well worth the just north of $100 I spent on it.  That is as cheap as they got, except for a couple tiny old ones that were $30 or $40 at another place, but they weren’t even close to this one, so I had to go with it.

Anyway, no sooner am I back in my own place than I realize something is seriously amiss with my internet.  As in it was barely working when it was working, and most of the time it wasn’t working at all.  By process of elimination, it quickly became clear that the modem was/is the problem.  After doing a little research last Sunday or whenever it was, I found a couple of potential fixes to try before taking it in.

And one of them worked to a certain degree.  It improved steadily during the week and is now working fairly regularly, though usually still pretty slow.  So it will still need to be taken in to be checked out, but I have it going now, so I thought I’d let y’all know I’m still around.

Though if you follow me on twitter, you know even balky internet hasn’t done much to shut me up. 😛

I’ve made somewhat decent use of the internetless & moneyless time though.  Fleshed out more backstory for the novel, did more card organizing (even got a few packages together so far), and I

‘ve done a lot of drawing of late.  Which brings us to this post.  I have new sketch cards to share!

And away we go!:

Starting it off as sexy as my mediocre skillz can muster with the original Latina comic book heroine, Senorita Rio!

Hmm… looks like I’ve a little more shading to do.  But never mind that now.  Moving on!

A fairly awful old rendition of Street Fighter's own Ryu that I finally got around to coloring not long ago...

More Street Fighter action coming up… right now!

Ken, the main of douches everywhere. Basically just replace Ryu's name with Ken's in the above caption. Done at the same time as Ryu.

Two more for this post and I’ll save the rest for later…

This is my commission for Shot Not Taken. You may have seen it twitpic'd already if you follow me on twitter.

I received Stan Winston & Gina Torres Ink Vault autos for this. So if you’d like a commission, and if your looking to trade cards for a sketch rather than pay ca$h money, there’s an idea of the kind of hittage it may take.  A lil cash & a lil hittage may be acceptable too.

We’re going baseball for the last one for today.

Another Nick Markakis sketch card. This is a little more like what I wanted to do with the first one.

I think this is one is supposed to go to Beardy if he ever decides to claim it.  It’s been done for awhile now.  I think I did this card back while I was working on the Breygent sketch cards, so three months or more.  Think I mentioned it was done in a comment over at his place, but just recently remembered to scan it.

That’s all for now.  I’ve been working on this post off & on for a good six hours, maybe longer, due to previously mentioned internet balkiness, and general distraction.  So, um, seeya when I see ya. 😉

Until our next…