It's been a while...

I haven't posted ANYTHING here for a long time. I've actually been VERY busy lately. Not with work or anything important like that. No, I've been spending a lot of my time and money adding to my obnoxiously large Star Wars Collection. I've spent many hours on forums at places like rebelscum.com and sandtroopers.com I've been making trades and purchases for countless toys and other memorabilia. Of course I was at the midnight screening for Episode III. In fact, I went down to our theatre at around 9 am to see if any kind of line was forming and found a decent queue had long been formed the night before. Having purchased and picked up our tickets weeks prior to the showing, I jumped in line with the rest of the geeks, and felt right at home. I had my fiancee meet me at the theatre, we were both wearing our Star Wars T-shirts and waited until midnight. It was well worth the wait. The theatre was actually organized and anticipated a large crowd and made as many accomodations for us as possible. These included offering hot dogs, soda and popcorn for only $1 each! When's the last time you saw those prices for concessions? They also allowed us into the theatre EXTRA early, by early I mean 7PM. I was very pleased with the way they ran things at the AMC Rolling Hills. Kudos to the staff there.
My current obsession is with the Topps Clone Wars Trading Cards. These came out some time last year and are now impossible to find in stores. I purchased 2 Hobby boxes from ebay at $75 a pop, and pulled an amazing Sketch Card. Sketch Cards are randomly inserted into Hobby packs (these are different than Retail Packs) at a ratio of 1:36 packs. Different artists have created these cards and some have made less than others. All are hand drawn and hand signed original works of art. All Hobby boxes should have 1 Sketch Card in them, no more. The clincher is to pull a hard -to-find artist. My favorite, my target artist is Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack, director of the Clone Wars Animated Series...the Series upon which this card collection is based. He created a number of sketch cards for this set. Supposedly only 125. The odds as stated on the wrapper of the card packs is 1 in 606 packs. Today I pulled this card out of a box... A Genndy Tartakovsky Anakin Sketch Card. My heart still races when I look at it. An original piece of art created by one of the best animators today.