(The following story is relevant to this thread - posted originally on the PSA boards in December, 2006...)
My wife says she doesn't understand my collecting obsession, but she knows exactly what I want the most. Here's the story: my local card shop owner is selling an incredible collection (on eBay) compiled by one of his customers. It's mostly modern stuff, but very impressive modern stuff, like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella cut auto cards. Anyway, he also had some graded vintage, including a Ryan RC in PSA 8 and '69 and '70 Ryans in PSA 9. Well, all of these cards were out of my league but there was one beautifully-centered vintage card in PSA 7 that I knew I had to have.
Although it was on the far-reaches of affordability for me, and I didn't have the cash at the time, I asked the card-shop owner to hold off selling it because I thought I could get the cash together by the end of January. He said he would. I told my wife about the card and she politely feigned mild interest. I said I intended to sell some of my raw HOFer cards that are dupes of cards that I now have in PSA 7 and 8 holders and the rest of my childhood coin collection to raise the necessary funds. The following weekend, I went to the cardshop to shoot the breeze (and to make sure that the card I was lusting over was still there). While I was in the shop, my wife called me on my cell and asked me if the shop was in the same outdoor mall as Home Depot. I told her it wasn't, the shop was in the next mall up the boulevard. I took her question as a not-so-subtle hint to go to Home Depot after I leave the shop to get some paint and lightbulbs we needed (not realizing until much later that her query was a very subtle and effective way to find out the exact location of the shop). So I stopped at Home Depot on the way to the coin shop, where the owner told me that he wasn't interested in my coins. Bummed, I returned home and told my wife that I couldn't sell my coins and I was a little worried about getting the money together that I needed by the end of January.
The first night of Channukah arrived last Friday and I was very excited because my wife ordered iPod nanos for our two teen-agers. As they were opening their gifts, she hands me a box. Now I'm very confused because we generally don't exchange gifts on Channukah (we keep the gift-giving for the kids). So as I'm opening the box, I really didn't have a clue, until I felt the thin plastic slab through the tissue paper...
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