1985 Topps, Jim Beattie

#505 Jim Beattie

Here is the second card that I sent to Jim Beattie last year. I wrote to him to get his '81 Donruss card signed and I decided to throw this card in, too, because I love this set so much. The '81 Donruss can be seen here.

Now onto a rant about a totally unrelated topic.

This year, my fiance and I decided decided to donate gifts for a needy child. We picked a kid through the Salvation Army's Angel Tree. I work at a retail store and we did most of the shopping for the child there so I could use my employee discount. We got everything on the kid's list of things he needed and it was all in the latest Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour gear.

Yesterday, I come out of the back room at work and there is a lady at the register returning some items. Sure enough, it is all of the stuff that I had bought for the Angel Tree recipient. The lady had some stupid story about how her dad had bought the stuff and none of it fit. When I told her that I was the one that had bought those items, she was a little surprised. She told me that she appreciated my generosity, but none of the items worked out because the kid had a weird build. Since all she had was the gift receipt, she could only get merchandise credit and that was what she did.

At that point I was a little flabbergasted about what had just happened. After she left, my assistant told me that she had called the day before and was trying to figure out how she could get cash back for the items and that she was really frustrated about the whole thing. When I heard that, I immediately went from flabbergasted to pissed off. The lady is probably going to sell that card so she can buy booze or drugs for herself. That is obviously worst case scenario, but I highly doubt that much of it goes towards the kid. Had I known that she had called the day before prior to giving her merchandise credit, I would not have let her return the items. I would have told her to bring the kid in over the weekend and he could pick out what he really wanted from my store. But, that obviously did not happen.

Like I said, this was the first year that we had done the Angel Tree. If I hadn't purchased the items at my store, I would not have known what had happened to the items I donated and everything would had been fine. But, knowing what I know makes me sick. We were trying to help a needy child have a better Christmas and his crummy mom had to take advantage of the system. Hopefully, I pulled a 1/1 when we picked that kid and that kind of behavior is a rare occurrence.

Nonetheless, we were really bummed out over how everything turned out and will be re-thinking about how we help out the less fortunate next Christmas.

Sorry to drag my personal issues into my blog, but this whole ordeal has been eating me up and I felt like I needed to share it.

The World Series is set

A few minutes ago, I was checking out the Bushmaster site. While I was there and looking at weapons, I couldn't decide what I wanted. So, I went and looked through some old photos of mine to see what my old M-16 used to look like. While I was looking, I found a few pictures of Iraqis wearing hats of the two teams that will be appearing in the World Series. Here they are.

First up is the first team to clinch, the Phillies. Check this out. Notice the one kid there with the Phils hat. He is accompanied by a few friends and my old gunner, SGT Burgess.



Unfortunately, the Yanks held off the Halos tonight. I would have preferred that the Angels had won, but ultimately, it would not have fit this post (I have no pictures of an Angels hat in Iraq). So here is an Iraqi kid that will surely be cheering on the Yankees on Wednesday.



Damn, I found another Yankee fan in the bunch. I guess that means the Yankees are going to win, 4 games to 2. I hope that is not the case. But if it is, at least we have someone to blame.



On a side note, these are the only two teams that I can find in my Iraq picture albums. I know that I saw more, but I do not have pictures of them. For instance, I saw two different Royals shirts there. One looked like a kids stadium giveaway. The other was a polo that looked like it belonged to an employee of the supermarket that used to sponsor the team. So, in the end, I think that it is kind of ironic that the only photos that I have of MLB teams in Iraq feature the two teams that will be facing each other next week. What are the odds?