It's here!

You know, if my mother had let me eat whatever I wanted to eat when I was a kid, this wouldn't be that big of a deal.

Twinkies never showed up in my house. And neither did whatever other Hostess products that featured a baseball card panel. Also, I believe my mother would have really had to let my nutrition go to hell for me to land a Ron Cey Hostess card in 1979, because everything I've read says that the short-prints in the '79 set appeared on less popular brands. "Have some sno-balls, kid! Nobody else is eating 'em, but nobody else has a Ron Cey card either!"

The Ron Cey card in the '79 Hostess set is a short-print, one of 15 SPs in the set (the others are J.R. Richard, Greg Luzinski, Ed Ott, Dennis Martinez, Darrell Evans, Rick Dempsey, Vida Blue, Phil Garner, Rick Manning, Mark Fidrych, Mario Guerrero, Bob Stinson, Al Oliver and Doug Flynn). The card has been on my Nebulous 9 list for months, longer than any other card since the list was started.

The Cey card was so unobtainable that there were four different people searching for the card for me at The National in Chicago -- the one card show that is supposed to have everything -- and all of them came up empty.

That's it, right? If you can't find it at The National, then forget it, huh?

Wrong.

We card collectors are more resourceful than that.

While The National was going on, the '79 Hostess Cey -- along with his panel buddies J.R. Richard and Greg Luzinski -- popped up on ebay. It was the second time that the panel had showed up since I had made a concerted effort to track down the card. The problem was that the ending time for the auction was when I would be at work and I just don't do enough auctions where I need sniper software.

Enter David.

He spotted the Cey Hostess panel at around the same time. He said he'd bid for it and I agreed for him to keep the Richard and Luzinski so he could recoup his money with those cards.

He won the auction.

And today, the Cey card arrived in the mail.

Let's see it again:

And the back:

I'm giddy.

This means I have all of the Hostess Cey cards, finally. And, I believe I have all of the Cey cards that are difficult to get that aren't some sort of meaningless parallel or variation.

Sure, there are still plenty of Ceys for me to chase. But there are none that are gnawing on my brain like this one was.

I still have other Dodgers Hostess cards to find, I'm hoping not too many of them are SPs.

Anyway, I think I'll be happy for quite awhile with this pick-up.

But just in case my Hostess high doesn't last long enough, David sent something else:

It's time to get serious with the 1976 Hostess collection pursuit with a full-fledged panel!

Only Jerry Reuss is coming close to reflecting the joy that I'm feeling right now.

I'll show you more cool stuff from David later.

Let's just enjoy a Hostess Cey one more time.

Mom, you could have bought the Twinkies, thrown them in the garbage and handed me the panel.