What The Heck Happened? Where Are You? Floods, Tornadoes, Cards and A Move...

Last spring seems like so long ago.  I was fighting with personal, family, and health issues and around April things were about at its worst.  To many who I have traded with know my story about my nearly decade in the Army, injuries during my deployments in Iraq, and suffering from sometimes painful bouts of PTSD/memory issues.  Mix in another variable, for those who live in the Midwest know of all the spring flooding we had.  My home is just blocks from the Missouri River and sewer back ups due to flooding caused damage about 25% of my collectibles.  After the flooding went down, it left my basement a moldy muddy mess.  Our landlord did very little after the April floods to clean up the mold, mud, and all the damage done to the lower level of our home that some of you may have seen me thinking about selling my collection.  We spent thousands of our own money trying to clean up the mess in hopes that the landlord help would come.  Having four young kids living in a house with now water damage we knew that we needed to move.  My wife and I started the process of buying a home in St. Louis, and my card collecting became almost forgotten since I was wondering if I really needed to sell it to make a deal on a new home.  I apologize if I left a few loose strings, but please hear me out.

Forward to the heat of June, with the water damage in the basement and AC unit taking water damage, it left our old house a moldy, mildew, musty mess.  We finally got things together and were able to move into a new home on July 1st.  It was a depressing month of June having to box up/and or throw away my damaged sports items.  On the bright side, most of my card collection was no longer stored in the basement but much of my other items such as balls, jerseys, hats, pictures...were still in the basement.  Here is a photo of what my basement looked like last year, I don't have a photo of what it looked like after since we had to turn off the downstairs circuit breakers since water got into the outlets. The sewer back up went nearly to the top of the pool table, which was a loss too.

Late May and June also hit our family hard when the tornadoes hit Oklahoma City (we lived near OKC for two years in the army) in an area we have a lot of army friends lose everything.  In a time we had issues of our own, we decided to help our friends who lost even more.  Here is our story in a local paper:

http://quicknewsnow.com/article/local-family-travels-oklahoma-helping-tornado-victims

I also brought to Oklahoma City nearly 15,000 sports cards to give to local shelters for children who lost everything.

Jason Pilarski

Hannah and Joshua Pilarski

Some of you may have had these moments when you think to yourself, what else could go wrong?  Well I am now happy to report that things are STARTING to work out once again, and I am once again looking at spending more time collecting and shifting through the remains of the boxes of damaged items.

So I'm offically back, I've missed a lot, I hope to get back into trading, and I have a small list of people I still owe something.  Thanks for the patience, hope you understand!  I have lots of great content I want to write about, but I really wanted to let you know I am not dead, gone, or forgotten...just hit a few months of bad luck.  I am going to retool my site in the next few days, so please PLEASE stick with me!!!

Thanks,
Jason aka Joe Average Collector
(REMEMBER:  I have a new address)