The cards will still be there in April

That's what I kept telling myself earlier today while holding the steering wheel in a death grip, head hunched over the dashboard, in a desperate bid to see through the patch of windshield that hadn't frozen over.

I'm telling you, there is nothing that will make you feel more alive than driving through white-out conditions. If you ever get bored with your situation, I'm inviting you up here for an invigorating spin down the interstate. It's as close as you'll get to driving while blind.

So, yeah, I didn't make it to the card show. I drove about five miles, tried to get off at the next exit, couldn't SEE the exit ramp, drove for another terrifying couple more miles, then turned around for home. That makes two years in a row I didn't attend the January card show. Like last year, I'll wait until April for another one to come around.

But unlike last year, I didn't sulk much. There's a couple of reasons for that. One of them is I've been buying for myself from the comfort of home a little more often.

I made an unofficial resolution not to buy any blasters this year. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. But the plan is to use the 20 bucks I would spend on nobodies from the Diamondbacks and Athletics and put it toward stuff I want.

Last week my second CheckOutMyCards package arrived. I'll show what I got. One card won't be featured here as it's to fulfill my end of a trade agreement. But I will say that it is a snazzy relic card of a popular player who may or may not make the Hall of Fame. That card, and all the other cards came to under 20 dollars.

OK, now on with the good stuff -- the Dodgers. You saw the first card. It's another one of those Action Packed cards of official bad-ass Reggie Smith.

I pretty much covered all the Ron Cey cards at COMC the last time, so this is the only one I received this time. It's a very strange card with a tiny image, and it's numbered but I don't know why.

I made an intentional attempt to get certain low-cost cards of Dodgers stars of long ago. One of them is Dolph Camilli, who was the slugger on the 1941 pennant-winning Dodgers team. He also won the National League MVP award that year.

I
 don't really do the rainbow thing, but since I had a few variations of the Andre Ethier Baseball Heroes card already, I decided to pick up a few more. Very pretty. I could get hooked on this very easily.

The rest of the cards I'm showing are all pitchers, since that's where my sympathy lies.

I had to get the Kellogg's 3-D Fernando Valenzuela card. It's odd for me to see '80s players on Kellogg's cards. To me, '70s are Kellogg's and '80s are Sportsflics.

I sure do like the SSPC set. I went after Andy Messersmith because there aren't many cards of him as a Dodger.

You can really bankrupt the family going for Hideo Nomo cards. So I picked up just one. 2004 Finest might be my favorite Finest year. This card is awesome to look at -- much more awesome than on the scan.

Speaking of pretty blue cards, I love this 2009 Bowman blue refractor of the Dodgers' future ace, Clayton Kershaw. Again, it's a deeper blue and way cooler in person.

I also grabbed the 2008 Heritage High Numbers insert Kershaw card. This one had eluded me for too long.

Instead of aiming for relics and autos this time, I saved a little bit of cash for a couple of vintage cards. The first one was my first 1960 Fleer Baseball Greats card.

It's also my first Dazzy Vance card. Vance was a great for the Dodgers in the 1920s and led the National League in strikeouts for seven straight years, winning the NL MVP in 1924. This photo, obviously, isn't from his playing days. But everything about the card rules.

It's so difficult to find cheap Koufax cards. But this one was marked way down and is in rocking shape. It's a 1962 Topps card and probably my favorite out of this purchase. I wish that Reds pitcher wasn't mucking up the card. But you can't go wrong with three Dodgers fireballers as floating heads.

That was the haul, except the one non-Dodger relic. I know everyone wants to know about the shipping. It was 6 bucks.

I really don't care if that's high or low. (It's high). I enjoy COMC. It's easy to find cards. I get to look at the cards. I find what I want. It all arrives together in the same package. I just can't get fired up over a couple of dollars. To me, shopping convenience is worth paying for. I'm not well off, but I don't need to look for a deal on everything. I don't drive all over the damn city looking for the best price on a gallon of gas. And I'm not going to give myself an ulcer crying about shipping.

If I was spending a lot more cash on cards then I might think differently about it.

I probably will head to sportlots in the next month or two. Just to mix it up. But I don't expect to express everlasting devotion to one place or another. It comes down to this: do I like the cards I got? Was the shopping process simple? Did I spend what I wanted? If the answer is yes to all those three, then I'm happy.