Wednesday, April 29, 2020

I did it!!!!

 2020 sucks so far, but finally an event worth having a beer on the carpet has come along.

After seven years of toil, I have finally completed my 1987 Calbee set! The last four cards, all of them from the short printed series (#75-100) arrived in the mail after I won them in an auction over the weekend.
 I have been looking forward to this day since I bought a 60 card lot of them back in 2013 and began piecing it together.  I made rapid progress during the first three years, putting together about 90% of it, but then progress slowed to a crawl.  In 2017 I was 31 short of completing it. In 2018 I was down to just 18.  And by 2019 I was down to just missing these last four.  And in 2020, I finally laid it to rest.

The cards are in a binder with 12 pocket pages that nicely display Calbee cards from the 1980s.
 


Its crazy how long this took.  When I started I was in my mid thirties, now I'm entering my mid 40s.  I didn't have any kids when I started, now I'm a father of two.  My sister was a healthy young woman when I started, now she is gone.  My wife and I were living in a small apartment when I started, now we have a house that we own.

Completing a difficult set a good way of recording important events in your life.  2013-2020 I will remember as the "1987 Calbee years".

This is far and away the most difficult set I've ever built.  There are probably only a handful of other people who have ever finished it - piecing together a 33 year old set of 382 cards that was distributed one by one in bags of potato chips is no easy task - and I might be the first non-Japanese person to have done it (though I don't know that for a fact).

Now that this is done, I've still got the 1975-76-77 Monster set which makes this one look easy in comparison, and the more modest 1986 Calbee set, along with my various menko interests, to keep me busy!

For tonight though I enjoy a beer to celebrate the completion of my 7 year quest!



13 comments:

  1. Woohoo! Congratulations!

    How big is that set?

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  2. A lot of things can happen in a 10 year span... both good and bad. I'd classify building this set as one of the good things. Congratulations!

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    1. Thanks! Yup, its one of the good ones :)

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  3. Congratulations on the completed set... ten years is a long time to work on something like that! Is drinking beer on the carpet a Japan thing, or just a Sean thing?

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    1. Thanks! Beer on the carpet is a....well, not a usual thing but I had the set spread out on the floor so it seemed a logical place to have one!

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  4. Congratulations! I've never completed a set yet, let alone a set like that.

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    1. Thanks! This is the first time I've completed a difficult one.

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  5. Congratulations! It's amazing how difficult it is to complete any Japanese set that wasn't issued this century. Even 2004 Calbee has proven to be a challenge, though not a seven-year challenge.

    Good luck on your other sets!

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    1. Thanks a lot! Let me know your checklist for 2004 Calbee, I have some doubles which I might be able to share (I've been working on that set since 2004, it was the first Calbee set I ever tried collecting).

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  6. #198 Kentaro Sekimoto. That’s all I need! Do you have an extra?

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    1. Sorry, I checked last night and don't have it. I have most of Series 1 and 2 complete but am still missing a lot of Series 3 cards.

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  7. Congratulations! Wow, that sounded like a beast!

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