Cold and snow

 

Even though everywhere I have lived it snows, I am caught unaware every year when the weather first gets cold and flakes start falling.

Yesterday as I was driving to and from work in the evening, the temperature was around 18 degrees, the coldest it's been since last winter, and the dumb ski vest thing I was wearing (I never could get the handle of those) was not protecting me. Then it snowed the last couple of days, nothing more than an inch or two but the first snow of the year, and I was not prepared. I could not handle the thought of scraping a windshield and I sat in the car waiting to be spirited away.

I'll get used to this in a day or two, hell, at this time last year we already had a monster storm a week before Thanksgiving. This ain't nothing. And it's enough snow to make things festive.

It also is an appropriate backdrop for the latest send from Sportscards from the Dollar Store. Douglas always seems to send his cards during the winter season, or maybe I'm just stereotyping a Canadian collector. But these packages are also always filled with football and hockey so cold and snow is on my mind!

Starting off with some new Sabres for me. Four players here are actually still playing for the Sabres -- amazing. The other two, obviously, are retired legends.

Per usual, I'm not following the Sabres much at this time of year except that I know that they're near the bottom as always, thanks to injuries and almost zero goaltending. I'll get fully up to speed around late January, about the time when all hope is lost.

Fancy cards of Sabres gone by.

 

This should be enough to get my 1991-92 Pro Set want list up (or just buy the whole damn thing), as I keep putting it off and now all three of these are dupes.

Time to move on to the other Buffalo underachievers. The Bills are in the middle of the roughest part of their schedule, which wouldn't have mattered nearly as much if they had not lost to several teams that had no business beating them (the Jets and the Patriots, really?). Now their playoff hopes are mostly shot. This is what cards are good for, you can relive the glory days of the '80s and '90s!

Here are the current Bills now (what, you don't remember Jim Kelly throwing that pass to Gabe Davis a couple weeks ago?). I bought a blaster of this year's Score and did atrociously with pulling Bills, so these are all appreciated.

 

I like the look of these Legacy cards.

In football cards these days, "team sets" mean picking up long-retired players like Jim Kelly and guys in college uniforms. I do not collect college football, I mostly wait for its season to be over, so why college is in an NFL set makes no sense to me.

 

So let's move on to the sport that makes the most sense to me -- most of the time. Almost nothing Doug sent baseball-wise was your typical card so it's going to be a little weird. This is a postseason Topps now card. I tried to find it on TCDB and couldn't. The player Will Smith is hugging, I believe is Max Scherzer. So much mystery to this thing.

Look, holly berries, this must be a Christmas-themed whatever! Doug left a note and said that it's from the Topps Online Advent set from 2020, you know that time of year when they make candles out of wood? ENOUGH WITH THE WOOD, TOPPS.

 

These are two Duke Sniders from this year's Panini Donruss and Prizm, the '90 Donruss-looking thing is the orange parallel and yeah I did a double-take on that.

 

 

Hey, it's my first Rob Segedin autograph! Segedin is one of probably hundreds of players now who got a rookie card from Topps in a given year in multiple upon multiple forms and then didn't get another card again. Segedin's year was 2017, absolutely blew up and then vanished.

The highlight of the package as the camo-parallels this year are numbered to 25. I guess these are desert-camo cards, which is about the opposite of what's outside my window right now.

 

 

Finally getting to my era with some O-Pee-Chee Dodgers. All of these are already in my Dodgers collection, which means I can add them to the general OPC collection for each year! That's fun. Derrel looks like he was picked up off a sidewalk.

These aren't OPC, but they are straight-out-of-a-1974-pack sharp and they'll be useful.

 

So those are the latest goodies from SCFTDS. It's still snowing lightly right now but it won't stay. It's supposed to be 50 by the weekend. My hope is the major snow holds off until January but there are no guarantees where we live.

 

And, yes, someday we won't live here.