Showing off.

A few months ago, my sturdy as nothing HP printer/scanner committed its final atrocities and died a painful death of suffering and repentance. At the time I had just started up my seasonal work again, so funds were low. I had my eye on a couple scanner combos at Target, but nothing came into place.

On Tuesday, things changed. I received a call from the Director of our local Cornell Cooperative Extension office...with a job offer. I gladly accepted, and have taken that final (or possibly, first) step into true adulthood: a career.

That's pretty fun to say finally, and am glad that I can finally be a productive member of society for twelve months a year, rather than seven.

Anyways, we celebrated with a copious amount of chicken wings on Thursday night, but I wanted to take a trip to Target to blow some dough on...whatever. There were some kiddies hanging out in the card isle (in front of sports cards!!1) so I wandered into the back to check on scanners. To my wonderment, I found a brand new Epsom wireless "Small-in-one" scanner-printer for $40.

$40.

For a wireless printer.

I was sold, immediately, and paid for it by lugging the damn thing around Target while the girl looked at clothes and magnets and whatevers.

So here I am now, sharing my new fortune with ya'll. And yes, I bought baseball cards, but they were quite terrible. So it goes.

The first card, your splash, if you will, is a scanned version of the Andrelton Simmons patch from a week ago. Sadly, this is a case where a photo is better than the scan. However, I have new patches to show off:

Un Cubano! I don't remember Darien Nunez from the WBC this year. The Cubans played first round in Asia, and were quickly bounced upon returning to our side of the globe by these guys:

Okay, so maybe I've shown this one before, too, but lay off me, I have a new toy that I am playing with. You'll notice Schoop's far right edge is trimmed a bit tight. Still some growing pains.

This guy has experienced no growing pains this year - as he's been the best Blue Jays far & away. This card is stunning in blue.

Stunning.

These ones, too - but they're in gold..or yellow...or orange:

I'm hearing Andre Rienzo is a sneaky prospect for the White Sox as a quality late-inning guy, and when he arrives he'll be the first ever Brasilian-born pitcher in Major League Baseball (Yan Gomes was the first position player.) The best part about this one is you can see exactly where the patch comes from on the jersey. 

I'll let you try and find out where.

So cool, in fact, I like it more than this card, I think:

...and that's a pretty great card. I accomplished one of my biggest JPA collection goals recently, which means I am likely to stop going all out on collecting him, concentrating on Jose Reyes and others. But not before picking this up:

These had so much potential, but the stickers absolutely murder the card quality. Ugghh.