Card additions and update

 It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’m still going strong. Lots of good has happened lately, so let’s get this post going. 

Let’s do the card stuff first. I’ve been slowly adding new Topps cards to the ‘80’s portion of my collection, and thanks to 2 big additions, I’m pretty close to completing some sets. 

A few weeks ago, I went to my friend Jim’s house. He lives about 5 minutes away from me, and collects St. Louis Cardinals, autographs, and is currently working on the 1963 Topps sets. I didn’t have any ‘63’s for him, but did have some cards of Nick Fortes for him. Nick lives in DeLand in the off-season, and Jim’s wife Paula taught at the elementary school Nick went to. Jim had a box of doubles from the ‘80’s that he let me dig through, and it helped me get get pretty close to finishing some sets. He darn near had complete 1983 and 1984 Topps Traded sets in the doubles box. I came away just missing 2 cards from the ‘84 Traded set (Randy Ready and Dwight Gooden), and 5 from the ‘83 Traded set (Floyd Bannister, Dann Bilardello, Leon Roberts, Darryl Strawbery, and Chris Welsh). The 2 biggies (Strawberry and Gooden) should be easy pickups for me, and I can technically knock 4 cards off of my list and get them cheap if I get the reprints of the cards from the subset in the 2001 Topps Traded set. The others will probably be easy sportlots pickups. 

On Friday, I got to go to Johnny’s Trading Spot headquarters in Ocala and dig through John’s trade boxes. I need to figure out how to get some cards he doesn’t have, because I’m out of Braves he needs, and it’s getting harder to find Chronicles cards he is missing. I had a stack of ‘23 Chronicles for him, and hopefully he found a few he could use. I need to take a trip to my LCS and hit the Braves boxes. 

I dug through some ‘80’s boxes and also had some fun opening a package of Topps cards that he had boxed up for a trade that ended up getting completed without the package being needed. There were about 20 packs of cards wrapped up in newspaper, and it was like unwrapping Christmas presents, and I got some needed cards from the packs. 

I found a number of guys I collect in the boxes. 

There were also a lot of Rays and Tigers. 

But the majority of them were Topps needs. 

1980, 1981. 

‘82, ‘83, ‘84. 

1985, the 1996 needs, 2001. 

A ton of 2003 needs. 

2005, 2006, 2007. 

And some 2012’s to finish it off. 

Many of my Topps sets are very close to being complete thanks to John’s help.  1982 Topps is missing 35 cards. 1985 Topps is 40 cards short. 1981 Topps is missing 20 cards. 2007 Topps is 54 cards short. 

The biggest one he helped on was 1996 Topps. I was maybe 10 cards short before I visited him, and I left missing just one card, #73 John Mabry. Once I get the Mabry card, I will have a complete run of ‘90’s Topps cards and a run of complete Topps and Topps Traded sets from 1986-1999. I have a good chance at extending that run to 1984 if I can get the 189 cards to finish the ‘84 and ‘85 sets. Might not finish it by the end of the year, but the ‘81 and ‘82 sets are darn close, and I can easily pick them up by then. Thanks so much, John, for the additions to my collection. 

I’m looking forward to the coming weeks. Topps Chrome comes out soon, the 2024 Topps complete set is soon after that, and sometime in August 2024 Donruss will be released. 

That’s not the best news either. Karen had an appointment at the Mayo Clinic on Thursday, and they gave me the best news I have had in a few years. She has been in the hospital 3 times this year with breathing problems. Just running out of energy and breath after walking short distances. The hospital would give her antibiotics and release her after a week, but after about a month, she would be ready to go back with the same symptoms. She is about at that point now, but she’s trying to hold out for the next few days. 

The lady she saw at Mayo thinks that she has some kind of infection in her lungs. They want to schedule a broncoscophy to see where the infection is and then treat it with antibiotics. They said to treat the infection, they would put her on antibiotics for close to a month. When we were at the hospital, they wouldn’t do the broncoscophy, and only gave her the antibiotics for a week. I’m hoping we get a call tomorrow and maybe we will get an appointment this week to do all that. 

They also want to do a sleep study on her. Karen gets maybe a hour of sleep a night. Just constantly wakes up and can’t fall asleep or get decent rest. She was on a CPAP before we were married, but with the pressure stuff with her head the CPAP would get her pressure very high so she stopped using it. Mayo wants to measure her pressure when she is sleeping with a CPAP and see if they can get a setting to where she can sleep with it and not have her pressure go high. 

They also want to get her on Dupixent to try to help her asthma. They haven’t even started with her shunt stuff, but getting the asthma and breathing and sleep stuff fixed would be amazing. I have confidence with these doctors and their resources, so I can’t wait to see what happens with this and see what they think about her shunt situation as well. 

Hopefully by the time I post again, I’ll have some sets completed and more health stuff will have answers. 

Thanks for checking out my latest post. 

-Jeremy