Chavez Ravining: First You Get The Sugar, Then You Get The Power, Then You Get The Cards

I celebrated my 27th birthday over the weekend in quarantine. I don't typically do a ton to celebrate my birthday, but it's usually a day filled with delicious foods and desserts. In a normal year my girlfriend and I might've gone out to one (or two) of our favorite NYC spots, but this year we did the cooking ourselves.

We started the day with crepes, my first time making those. We loaded them up with tons of sugary toppings, inlcuding nutella and raspberries. They were tasty but a little too rich, so we skipped lunch.

My girlfriend designated herself in charge of dinner, and she made an absolutely delicious lasagna and followed that up with a stellar key lime pie (pics at the bottom of the post for you foodies).

The food alone made it a great birthday.

But this was a really great birthday. There were cards involved.

While the lasagna was in the oven, I opened up one of the gifts from my girlfriend. A bright purple gift bag filled with polka-dotted tissue paper contained something I thought was a bit unusual: a bubble mailer.

And what was in the bubble mailer?

Four (!) autographs from the 2001 Inkworks The Simpsons Mania! Autographs set.

I'm a huge fan of The Simpsons (it's my all-time favorite show), and I've spent much of the last several months binging the show while locked indoors.

The Simpsons had several card sets back in the '90s and early 2000s, including two autograph sets in 2000 and 2001. The cards above hail from the absolutely gorgeous 2001 set. Just look at all of that color!

Each card contains four squares, each containing one of the many characters the respective voice actor voices. The cream of the crop here is certainly the Dan Castellaneta card which can command some serious coin on eBay. Dan voices dozens of characters on the show, most notably Homer Simpson. The title of this post is a haphazard reference to one of my favorite scenes.

The backs of the cards list other characters voiced by the actor but don't necesesarily offer up much else. The pièce de résistance of these cards is definitely the color--these things pop!

The 2001 set contains seven different autograph signers, and I was able to check off four of those in one fell swoop. I'm now on the hunt for Nancy Cartright (Bart Simpson), Hank Azaria (Chief Wiggum), and Yeardley Smith (Lisa Simpson).

I'm absolutely ecstatic to add these to my collection--thanks, Mia!

I'll end this post with a few of my favorite clips from some of the characters above (plus food pictures!).