So Surreal... (Pt 1.5)

 

Congrats to Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia who were absolute titans in the game when I first got interested in baseball.

Also congrats to the other inductees (unfortunately they're all before my time and I don't have their cards).

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Goals for 2025, Grades for 2024

  新年明けましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願いします！

Happy New Year Everybody! 

Japan entered 2025 a few hours ago but on the last day of the year I caught the flu and I was sick in bed for the whole day so this post is a little late.

A lot of things happened in 2024 that ended up taking me mostly out of the hobby, I'm kind of curious how that impacted my goals I set forth last year.

2024 Grades

3. Get a New Hobby

C.

I look at this from two angles. The first is that there is another "hobby" I adopted by simply going from collecting sports cards to Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Which is fine and dandy but as laid out in my goals post from last year, I wanted a hobby that didn't involve accumulating stuff.

Which brings me to another activity I picked up, cooking. Before I moved I was actually frequently cooking. A good 18-19 of the 21 meals I ate every week were prepared by me. Then as part of my move there was a prolonged period where I was living in a hotel and had to subside off of take-out. Now that I've settled the paperwork for a new residence and have a kitchen again I'm cooking frequently again but the hiatus I took in between still impacts the grade. Overall, C.

2. Still Track My Spending

F.

During the aforementioned hotel life period I picked up a ton of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards but I didn't bother to keep track of any of that spending. Which is bad, my spreadsheet keeping track of this ends right when I leave for Japan. I needed to do better here but didn't.

1. One Non-Certified Autograph Intended for Me

A.

I made a blogpost dedicated to how I got a bunch of cool cosplayer pick-ups and those pick-ups only continued in Japan. Yay.

Man, these results are mid personified. Time to lay out goals for 2025 where I'll hopefully do better.

2025 Goals

2. Track My Spending Again

I slacked off, I can't let that happen again in 2025. I'll track it in Japanese Yen then use a 365-day average at the end of the year to convert it into some rough idea of what it would've been in USD.

1. One Non-Certified Autograph Intended for Me

This should be fun now that I'm in new places and seeing if the tricks I picked up during all those years of autograph hunting in the states can translate. Although to be real, I'm probably going to keep going down the cosplayer/model route over baseball players.

Only establishing two goals because thanks to all of the changes I'm not sure what to expect or aim for going into 2025. All I can do is set up goals for something which I'd probably want to do anyway.

All told I would consider this year fun. The constant shuffling and moving stuff around (ie the extreme downsizing) was very cathartic. As I waived goodbye to my Luis Torrens collection, I hit the reset button on basically everything and the transition was pretty smooth all things considered. I didn't really get too settled in to my new life due to timing and a lot of extra paperwork but that's what 2025 is here for.

So with that here's one last goodbye to 2024 with my favorite pick-ups from it to close us out.

Technically from 2023 but well, still cool af

As always thanks to all of you for stopping by :).

Take care.