Buckle in, peeps! This is a long one...
A few weeks ago, my wife had an idea - that we should consider helping serve as a woman's homeless shelter on Christmas morning. When we told my parents, they decided they wanted to come as well. We told some other friends about it too, and they met us up there too. This morning, the 8 of us set out to serve in whatever capacity we were needed. We weren't sure what to expect. This past thanksgiving, we signed up to help serve the homeless, and we volunteers ended up outnumbering the ... (volunteer-ees?) 10 to 1. Each time someone came in the door, we all had to keep ourselves from rushing to them first.
This morning was completely different. After signing about 50 Christmas cards, we were all given gifts to present to the families who were there. After that, we were instructed to "help out" in the snow...in 80 degree weather. As it turns out, they had hired a company to fill their outside play area with snow so the families could have their very own winter wonderland - Texas style. In what I thought would be a 2 1/2 hour assembly line to help feed and give gifts to the needy ended up being a 3 hour long snow ball fight with the kids. I'd definitely mark this down as the best Christmas I have ever had as an adult! It was really more about having fun with the kids....and occasionally nailing unsuspecting passers-by with snow balls.
Looks legit, doesn't it?
Well, zoom out and you get a better picture of it all.
I thought it would be funny to get my friend to stand in line with the kids to take our pic with Santa. #worthit.
My son even got in on the act with a snow ball fight (no, he isn't punching me in the face!)
When I said it was time to go, dad was genuinely upset. He said it was the most fun he has had in 20 years. Playing in the snow this morning is the last thing that I thought we would be doing on Christmas, but I'm glad it happened. As always, I wish I could take credit for coming up with these selfless acts, but it wasn't me, it was my wife. She is great with this sort of thing.
Oh, did I mention we also went to see Star Wars? I mean, how could we not? My son has basically been talking about it non-stop since...2013. Yeah, we dressed up to see it. All of us.
So ... yeah. It has been a really fun end of the year so far!
With all this fun stuff going on, nothing compares to what happened to me a week and a half ago.
Let me try to get you in my head. It was late at night, and my wife was gone to a church function. My son is in bed and I'm alone downstairs, on the computer looking for Canseco cards on eBay that I do not yet have. Not a creature was stirring, not even ... our dogs. All you can hear is me clattering on the keyboard.
Then all of a sudden ... BZZZZZZZZZZZZ ring!
My phone just made a sound that it doesn't normally make. I reached over to pick it up, and I was presented with a notification:
!!!!!!! (See the ! in the picture above? Even Twitter was surprised!)
I quickly searched for ways that this could be a joke somehow, but sure enough, the private message was coming from Jose's account!
Jose: Hey buddy how are u
Me: Good, thanks!
Jose: Great! Just wanted to say hello. How is the family?
Me: Doing well, thanks. Our son just turned 13 a few months ago. I was actually in the middle of looking for one of your cards online. <Note to readers: Yes, I really did say that ... ugh, lol.>
Remember the lego we did of him?
Well, we also did one of Leila had sent both to them as a fun gift because we had some conversations about legos when we were at their house.
I asked him if he received them, and he said yes, thank you and Leila kept them.
We chatted for a while and ended up talking for a little bit back and forth over the course of several days. I was impressed that he didn't want anything ... he just wanted to say hi. I asked if he was interested in me doing a small project for him that involved graphic work, and some pics of him/Leila/their pets. He liked the idea, and gave me Leila's number to text her to get some pics.
She mentioned she would send me pics the next day, but it never happened. Instead, Jose wrote the next day and said that Leila told him to tell me that she was sorry she hasn't been able to shoot over the pictures yet, as she has been busy with several photo shoots.
It isn't as cool as hanging out with him with my family at his house, but I am still ecstatic to have some sort of contact with my childhood hero. I have curbed myself from trying to reach out too much, as I don't want to overdo it and annoy him - I truly felt like things could only go downhill from my "lottery visit" with him this past year. However once again, he and Leila were both overwhelmingly kind and polite. My inner 9 year old is jumping for joy all over again ... well then again, so is my outer 35 year old. I look forward to doing this little project for them!
SOOOO ... with all that said, you might as well just click away, because nothing else I am going to say in this post is going to measure up to chatting with Jose...but I've still got more to say, so I'm going to go ahead and keep going
I was contacted by a collector who wanted to have me do a custom booklet of Joe DiMaggio. I gotta say, I love doing some of the baseball legends. This one was particularly interesting, because it portrays the Yankee Clipper as the ... San Fransisco Seal. What a great concept! The plan was to do a quad jersey cut signature booklet. Here is what I had to work with:
I had some concerns about the size and placement of the signature, but it was cool to see that 2 of the jersey cards had pinstripes. I don't have any problems posting pics of these Sweet Spot cards destroyed, because they are ... well ... plain.
Upon extracting the jersey pieces, it looks like Upper Deck had actually covered up pin stripes on the other two blank jersey pieces!
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