The Hopeful Chase Trading Post is Open For Business!

So, recently I took a little trip down to Florida. While it was nice to leave the cold, gray Chicago behind for a few days the trip wasn’t solely to soak up some sunshine. After roughly seven years, it was time to take my collection out of my in-laws (saints) closet and bring it up to the Windy City.

The Duchess (also a saint) agreed to fly down with me and help drive 100,000 pieces of cardboard back to our cramped apartment.  I did kind of bribe her with the promise of stopping in Nashville for a couple of days.  Believe it or not, after 13 years together this would be our first roadtrip over 6 hours together.  That might be one of the reasons we’re still together.

On a Friday morning we left cold, slushy Chicago behind and hopped a flight to Tampa.  Once there we picked up our sweet ride for the trip.

When you’re moving a couple hundred pounds of hockey cards, baseball cards and random stuff (a trash can!  a toolbox!) almost 1,200 miles you don’t get a convertible no matter how nice the weather might be.  

After a quick lunch by the water, one of the things I miss most from the Tampa Bay Area, we were off to the in-laws.  It didn’t take long to load it up the next day.  When there are four people and no stairs involved things move pretty quickly. With the van loaded, it would proceed to sit in the driveway for the next day or so.  I borrowed the in-laws car to go to the Lightning game with a friend (something else that I miss mightily) and then, the next day, we were off at the literal crack of dawn.

I won’t bore you with the details of the road trip with this post, suffice it to say, it’s a long way from Tampa to Nashville and there isn’t much to look at.  Despite my mother-in-law’s concern, no one broke into the van while it sat in a public garage for two days. Or if they did, they realized stealing 40 boxes of baseball cards would be the dumbest crime in the history of petty theft.

The drive from Nashville to Chicago wasn’t much more exciting, although the windmill farms in Indiana are impressive.  We survived the trip (podcasts are a wonderful thing) and managed to get the cards up to the third floor without getting a parking ticket.

The point of this post is to let you collectors know that I have my collection back.  That means I am ready to deal.  That’s right it’s trading time, bitches!  At some point we’re going to move again and it would be cruel to make the movers carry all of these cards down three flights of stairs.  I figure I can cut the collection in half just by dealing my baseball duplicates and cutting my hockey collection down to what it was originally intended to be - Lightning only.

So this is your chance to fill some gaps in your collection.  If you have baseball needs from the mid-80s to 2010 or hockey needs from the junk era (PRO SET, PRO SET PRO SET) shoot me a line.  I’ll check your want lists out and we can work something out.  I’m not looking for a lot in return.  After all the purpose is to reduce the collection not just swap cards in and out.

I already have one deal in the mail and a couple of feelers out.  I will do my best to keep a running track of the number of cards that are shipped out.  I don’t think I’ll load anything new on Zistle, the rumors of its demise are swirling once again, and I don’t feel like loading that many cards into a new site one by one.

So, it’s time to go old school. Hunting through want lists and and sending out emails. It’s the way I traded when I first started blogging. Look for more card related posts here as well.  If I stumble across some card I haven’t seen in a decade I might post about it. For instance, I forgot how nice some of the cards in the 2008 Upper Deck set looked. Trades I’ll definitely post about.

The 91 Days of Stamkos project over at Raw Charge is winding to an end, and I’ll need to something to write about on a daily basis.  I think The Duchess enjoys the fact that I’m sitting at a desk doing something productive as opposed to binge watching Bones during the day. And I KNOW that she likes seeing cards go out the door as opposed to coming in.

I’m not setting any specific goals for trades, just want to reduce and make people happy.  I’ll be listing a few cards on eBay, but really there really aren’t many big ticket cards sitting in the boxes in our living room.

If you’re interested in trading, leave a comment, email me (yerf@hotmail.com) or hit me up on Twitter.  Thanks for your help!