Hello blogosphere!

After many months of procrastination and child rearing, I have decided to finally throw my card collecting hat in the ring into the sportscard bloglist. I feel that I should provide a little informational backdrop as to how I have gotten to this point as a collector.

My fascination with card collecting began at about the age of 10, spending summers running around town with my cousins, buying packs of 85 Topps Baseball at the local pharmacy. My cousin was a shrewd trade artist, and always ended up swindling everyone for the most valuable cards. Somehow he ended up with 3 or 4 Mark McGwire olympic cards, the holy grail of rookies at the time. I continued dabbling with collecting baseball and Alf cards for a few years until 1989 when this changed my whole world:



Every collector knows it well, the card speaks for itself. I am no Mariners fan but like most other hobby enthusiasts I got completely caught up in the hype and excitement. I even owned one briefly, my most prized possession secured in a screw down case. For the next 5 years I was hooked. Then I graduated high school, and much like Andy's forgotten toys, my cards sat neglected in storage for the next 15 years. Now I have a 1 year old son, and in the never ending battle for organization, I started cleaning the garage and stumbled upon my dusty boxes. After the sad realization that most of my cards were worthless, (I threw out around 20,000 cards) I stumbled upon what I've been missing all these years. A community. Could it be there were still passionate hobbyists still out there in the interwebs? Not only was the answer yes, but a resounding yes. First my eyes were opened by VOTC and his somewhat traumatizing yet strangely therapeutic video. Then I searched around a bit and discovered the likes of Sports Cards Uncensored, A Cardboard Problem, and many more. My eyes were fully opened once I found all these same people on twitter (you may know me as "swanssy") and joined some fantastic ongoing discussions. I have tried to learn from these elder blogs, and hope to eventually build a site worth visiting also.

So without further ado, let the Waxtopia official launch begin! To keep my card related tweets separate, (and to stop driving my non collector friends crazy) I have opened a new twitter account, @waxtopia. I plan to do some giveaways in the future, and look forward to many future discussions with all of you, from vintage wax to the newest releases!