and then there were three

The past 2 months have been quite interesting for me as my wife and I had something happen that we were hoping wouldn't happen for another year.

She lost her job.  Totally out of the blue, they called her into HR at the beginning of April and gave her the heave ho. 

We were truly hoping to get her through that job until 2020, which would have seen us have a few bills/loans paid off, and allowed her to go off into retirement without a lot of stress.

Well, life as many of you know will throw you many curveballs.  The big thing for me in this?  I've really had to cut way back on my card spending.   I hadn't bought anything on Sportlots for a couple of months until this past weekend, and even then I only spent just over $5 including shipping on 9 cards.

I'd looked for these 95-96 Collectors Choice Players Club parallels on COMC for a while, but the prices were a little ridiculous.  Pricing 7 of the 9 cards out just now would have cost me almost $8 (no copies of the Friesen and Zhamnov on the site currently), and that's before shipping.  So getting these for less than $6 was a great deal for me.

I'm finally down to just a trio of cards to finish this set, after a quarter of a century.  I'll probably end up going back to Sportlots to finish this off, since I just checked COMC and only two of the 3 cards are available.  I've found a lot of good deals over the past few years on COMC, but for this set, it's been a real strikeout to say the least.

It will be great to finish this set off finally after all these years.  It never should have taken this long to begin with....

Thanks for reading!

Robert

Over The Hillier

I've had a good run of trading over the past 3 weeks at the TCDB website, and a trade that I received today from far away North Dakota helped me finish my fourth set this year.

Interesting that this card of Randy Hillier finishes the 198 card 1991-92 OPC Premier set for me because it features Randy in his final stop of his 10 year career, as a member of the Buffalo Sabres.  Interesting because I thought that this might be the only "mainstream" card that would feature him in a Sabres jersey, as he was acquired during the 91-92 season from the Islanders.   Turns out, the trade was in October, early enough in the season for Pro Set to get 2 cards of him in the blue and gold, and Pinnacle to have 1.

Randy was a part of the big trade between the Islanders and Sabres that saw superstars Pat LaFontaine and Pierre Turgeon change teams. 

I'm glad to see this set finished as it sat in the closet as part of a bigger box of hockey cards for a very long time.  Just one more set to hit the soft goal of 5 completed sets during 2019!!

Thanks for reading!

Robert