A collector's 'Fat Tuesday'

I have mentioned before that I do not participate in Black Friday. The reasons are obvious to anyone who chooses not to walk  into a store that day. I also do not participate in Small Business Saturday or Cyber Monday or any other "designated day" to do my shopping. I shop when I want, where I want, nobody going to tell me otherwise. I ain't no sheep.

There is this thing on Check Out My Cards in which sellers slash their prices on the weekend of Black Friday. Everyone seems to think this is a good idea. Deals! Deals! Deals!

It would be an excellent idea for me, too -- if I had someone on my Christmas list who collects cards. But I don't, which means I don't care what kind of deal you offer me on Black Friday, I'm not buying. By this point, all my cash is going toward family and friends who don't consider cards an ideal Christmas gift. If you wanted my interest, you should've slashed prices around, oh, Sept. 19th, or some time when I actually had disposable income.

But COMC doesn't care, because it knows it's getting my money anyway. Every year at some point in mid-November, I have one last card binge before I have to save money for girly things or boring things or weird things. You know, the stuff other people consider "gifts."

Sometimes this binge happens in person, sometimes it happens virtually. This time it happened at COMC. My only rule is that the cards get purchased before the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Because that's when the spending on greedy night owl stops. I call that Tuesday, "my Fat Tuesday." One final day of binging on cards.

I had accumulated a few cards over the weeks and purchased them the week of the 11th, in hopes that they'd arrive before I left for the holiday. They didn't. But that's OK, because I had goodies waiting for me when I got home!

Let's see some of the goodies, OK?

I'll start with some Kershaws. Here is an orange refractor from this year. I don't even have the base Chrome Kershaw yet. We don't have to collect in order now, do we?

The Finest Kershaw is a rarity in these parts. I don't go to my card shop anymore (there's no guarantee they'll even have Finest anymore anyway), and folks who did breaks of Finest, like A Cardboard Problem, don't appear to be around anymore.

The Platinum Kershaw looks very cool, and, of course, I received one in the mail from someone else at the same point. It makes me want to check out the COMC return policy again.

Moving on to the Kemps. Both of the beautiful blue refractor variety.

The Bowman Chrome, once again, I do not have in normal base variety. I sure did enjoy it in 2010 when Bowman Chrome went with different images than in its regular Bowman set.

Wow, that's quite a shock to the system going from BoChro to an unlicensed cheapie from the '70s!

Cey is the No. 1 guy that I collect, but there aren't a ton of Dodger cards of him that I don't have already (at least that aren't strangely expensive). So I leap on things like this. It's a wonderful Wiffleball disc card from 1978. There are so many of these generic ball/disc '70s cards, but Wiffle is the one I remember from when I was a kid.

This is my "random grab" card from my purchase. There are loads of these TCMA Brooklyn Dodgers cards from the '70s. One day it will be my focus to get them all. But for now, let's enjoy the Billy Cox, and all that background above him.

I nabbed these two 1964 Topps World Series cards (Koufax looks like he's panicking that someone is wrenching his arm in the bottom photo), featuring the fantastic 1963 World Series.

Because those two cards allow me to do this:

The '63 Series in all its glory. Damn, I wish I was alive for this thing.

I decided to start getting serious about filling some Fleer Greats of the Game needs. Not too serious, because I was running out of cash at this point. But this is a nice start.

I like this one, too. I was starting to get concerned about my lack of Dodger Al Lopez cards.

And a numbered Fernando. These are terrific-looking cards. I recommend getting some of your own.

Since I wasn't collecting much in the early 2000s, I get cards like this mixed up with the Fleer Greats all the time. I suppose the giant "Fleer Premium" in the left-hand corner should've tipped me off. But it doesn't matter because I NEED THIS CARD. That's what it's all about, right?

One more bit of Dodger history, and then I'll be done.

Picked up these two Gibby Masterpiece parallels, both numbered to 50, to continue to commemorate the greatest home run ever. For those technically minded, one of these cards is "ionized" and the other is "blue steel."

But I don't care what they're called because the cards allow me to do this:

Now, that's a lot more fun than anyone can have on Black Friday.

I have no idea how many more parallels of this card there are. I don't expect to chase down any others anytime soon. I'm sure there's some crazy ones numbered to 5 or something that I'll never get. I'm just happy with these.

And that was most of my purchase.

But not all of it.

I have a tiny bit more to show.

Emphasis on "tiny."