Hanging Out and Eating Cake

Birthdays just don't carry the same weight as they used to.  Well.  At least to me.  I'm not gonna say it's exactly like the other 364 days out of the year, but I'm way past the point of marking my calendar and waiting for the day to arrive.

On the other hand... a few of my former students look at it as an opportunity to hang out, eat cake, and catch up with their middle aged teacher who refuses to dab or take selfies.  It's moments like these that remind me of just how lucky I am to have picked this career twenty-something years ago.

After hanging out with them for awhile, I headed over to the annual GT Sports Marketing Show held at the Santa Clara Convention Center.  There were only eight to twelve card dealers, but I found some pretty cool items that I'll share later in the week.

Which leads me to today... my actual birthday.  This morning I hit up the De Anza Flea Market with my buddy and found a vendor who was blowing out his inventory of sports and non-sports trading cards.  I haven't taken photos of my purchases, so that too will be shared later in the week.

Instead... I'll show off the contest prize package I won over at Johnny's Trading Spot:

2018 Topps Archives The Sandlot Coins

2018 Topps Archives The Sandlot Inserts

Archives is one of my favorite products year in and year out... and I'm excited to say that these are the first to hit my collection.  The coins are very cool, but I'm even more excited to try and build the 11 card insert set.

If that wasn't generous enough, he also included these parallels and inserts:

Congratulations Johnny on your 5th year of blogging and thank you so much for the cards!  I hope all of you are having a great holiday weekend.

Happy Saturday and sayonara!