The View From Wisconsin

This has been a "perfect storm" of a weekend for me - literally and figuratively.

There was a huge snowstorm on Friday, which was coupled by the holiday weekend and staffing issues going into the weekend at work. There was a combination of high-seniority staff off for the weekend on vacation, and a lot of other staff out sick with the flu bug. This led to three straight mornings of ordering - and two of those saw the same three people get ordered twice in a row.

As if that weren't enough, the general road conditions around here this weekend were crappy. The county road crews have pretty much given up on trying to clear anything but the Interstates and the
other state trunk highways, due to a lack of salt/sand and under-staffing issues.

Meanwhile, the cold has done a number on me, both mentally and physically. Three days of warmer weather and then you get dumped on by another snowstorm - with my dear father then calling me to tell me how hot it was out in Arizona, and how he suffered with a sunburn while watching a baseball game.

On a different note: I was close enough to completing the 2008 Topps Baseball Series One set that I decided to order the rest of the singles online from Beckett.com. The cards arrived today - and I came to the sickening realization that I had missed two of the cards. I place the blame on how Beckett's Marketplace sorts entries: card number 1 is followed by card 10, then 100, then 101... and if you have a really high number card and/or a really low number card, it gets lost in the shuffle.

That's what happened to the two cards I didn't order - card 6 and card 291. I've gone back to Beckett and ordered the cards I'd missed from another dealer. I also ordered a couple of cards that I was short because of the "gold foil" variation.

Looking back through the set to find those gold foil variations isn't an easy task; you essentially have to look at each card and see if the "TOPPS" logo is silver or gold. Then, there's another version: I've found two cards that have no foil on the TOPPS logo on the top of the card. I'm not sure that these are as much "error cards" as they are "misprints". I suspect the latter, of course.

As to the cards themselves: I think I mentioned in a previous post about card 176, Troy Patton, a rookie pitcher for the Houston Astros. The photo on his card looks like it was taken outside his apartment door in Kissimmee or something. And I won't even go into the third variant of the Red Sox celebration (a different color print on the Giuliani photoshopped-card).

Other things:

• One fourth of my bracket got busted when USC tanked to Xavier. Should have known better than to go against a team whose mascot is named for my favorite brand of candy.
  
• The Admirals had their winning streak snapped on Saturday at Rockford - without Pekka Rinne in net. Dov Grummet-Morris did his best but was on the losing end of the 3-1 score. Unfortunately, as I type this they Ads are losing in the tail end of the home-and-home series with the IceHogs, 3-0.
• Nashville is still two points out of the 8AFPOS, but the Avalanche are having issues trying to win hockey games - especially without their expensive rent-a-player Foppa on the ice.