My baseball cards are starting to pay off.

Back in elementary school, I collected a lot of baseball cards with my brothers. One of the coolest (ie most expensive cards) I got was a 1989 Fleer Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. It was worth about $10 as I recall. So I bought a nice case for it, and stored it away.

So I was being bored today and I ran across an article about Ken Griffey Jr and how he's approaching his 600th home run. That got me to thinking about that rookie card of his. I looked it up online and one site has the card listed for $49.95! Sweet!

As kids, we loved collecting baseball, basketball, and football cards. But mostly just baseball cards. I have no idea how much money we sank into those cards, either. It seemed like that's all I bought for a while. There was a sweet sports card store right in Alpine. "The card shop" as we called it, although I doubt that was the real name. We'd ride down there on our bikes or rollerblades and buy a few packs of cards and a soda.

The card shop owner was cool too. He'd shoot the breeze with us, give us deals on candy or cards. We'd trade for specific cards, or just plain sell them. We'd check out the latest Becketts (monthly price magazine for sports cards) and see if our cards had gone up in value. We knew most of our valuable cards numbers by heart, so looking them up in the Beckett was easy.

Ah... good times. Many hours were spent hanging out at the card shop.

Mom really didn't have anything against it either. She was just glad we were outside, instead of playing video games or watching TV.

We have boxes of cards somewhere, probably in a dark closet at my parents house. I wonder what they are all are worth.

Kiting... again

So we went out the next day. This time, Marc brought his 5 meter kite and we got to give it a whirl.


Here's Marc, showing us how it's done.



And then there's me. And yes, Andrew is holding on to my harness. The wind was super strong that day, and we were nervous about being thrown around by the kite.

All in all, a fun day. Marc has a kite buggy as well. I think we should try that out sometime this summer.

Let's go fly a kite!

Seriously, let's go fly a kite.

That's what I did this afternoon. My coworker, Marc, told me he and some people went kite flying today during lunch, and I mocked him. Something about how I haven't done that in about 24 years, being something I gave up when I graduated from kindergarten. Anyway, I was wrong.

The kites Marc has are some serious kites! There more like mini parachutes, really. The kite in these pictures is a 4 meter kite, meaning there are four square meters of surface area. Marc started me on the 1 meter kite. The "trainer", he called it. After playing with that one for a few minutes, he let me try the 3 meter kite. That pulled a lot harder, of course, than the 1 meter kite.


In these pictures you can see that this 4 meter kite has four main strings, and the handles are actually strapped on to me! The straps are for safety, believe it or not. If the handles were to slip out of my hands, the straps would pull the strings in such a way that the kite literally collapses and falls gently to the ground.

The handles allow me to control the kite, and I can make the kite turn to the left or right. I'm told this is method of control is very similar to the way parachuters control their chutes.


You can see from this pic that I was doing everything I could to stay in one place. This kite had some serious pull to it. It's hard to stay in one place wearing flip flops. I think next time I should wear cleats. Even then I'm sure I'll get pulled around some. Like I said, this kite is only a 4 meter kite. Marc said his 5 and 10 meter kites have harnesses that you put on, like a climbing harness! I'm thinking I may want to strap that harness to a car or something.


You can view all the pics that we took on my PicasaWeb album.