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TRADING CAAAARDS.

I've spent much of today bent over a pair of binders, each jammed full of trading cards in plastic sleeves. IT IS ABSURD, but it's also actually really fun. We have about a thousand Marvel Comics trading cards from between 1990 and 1996, though we managed to miss most of the really valuable ones. Still, some are worth a few bucks and others just look cool, so I'm taking about ten pages back with me and Mum's shipping the rest, and my job is to turn a large pile of trading cards into a small pile of cash.

You can really tell what was popular in the 90s, and perhaps too what was popular with us. The X-Men and Spider-man both had many different runs dedicated to them, so we have like a jillion cards showing Cyclops, including the one where he's dressed as Elvis. We have a full set of Spider-man 30th Anniversary cards (except, again, the actual valuable ones, which were add-in extras). So many Wolverines. So many.

The cards I'm carrying back with me are a combination of those I suspect are the most valuable and those that I want to keep, predonimantly Captain America cards (because LOL). I went through all one thousand cards looking for characters I'd like to keep, and you guys, in a thousand cards we did not have one single Hawkeye.

Though I did find a hilarious one of Black Widow rescuing a baby.

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OH GOD I FINALLY FINISHED IT.

Up and Down Stairs, by Jeremy Musson, is an odd book. On the one hand it's super-informative and clearly thoroughly researched. On the other, oh god, it is so hard to finish. I've been working on it for months, off and on, and it's only 250 pages.

( It's essentially a history of service in England... )

Final Verdict: If you're really, really into English country house servants, or you're writing a detailed Downton Abbey fanfic, this is the book for you. Casual readers may, like me, start to skim large chunks of text looking for the funny bits.