Night Owl Cards

If you've been reading this blog long enough you know the routine: March arrives in a blaze of burning dumpster fires of all shapes and sizes. I dodge said fires the best I can. If I get to the end of the month alive, I buy a few cards to celebrate. Guess what? It's the end of the month. I'm still alive. I bought cards to celebrate! Per usual, it's just a few because who has the time? Plus there's a card show on the horizon, so I need to stock up. My annual "good riddance" purchases usually focus on whatever whimsical cards catch my fancy. And this year was no exception. Pow. It is my goal to obtain all of the 1980 TCMA Albuquerque Dukes cards I can. I've loved the border design since I was a wee one and many of the players on the team then were the first Dodger prospects I ever knew. But this card is particularly special because what do I mention first? Is it the bald-headed guy you'd never expect to see on a baseball card? Is ...

Another Blog Bat Around has snuck up on me, and it's kind of in my area of expertise. "What is," Nachos Grande asks , "the hardest set that you have ever collected (or tried to collect)." I'm going to assume that by "hard," he means "difficult" and not "made out of granite" (OK, night owl, don't be a jerk). This Blog Bat Around is directed at set collectors, of which I am one. But it focuses on something that I try to avoid. I intentionally do not try to complete sets that might be difficult. I don't need challenges like that in my life. I have a job. I have a family. I have a teenager and a dog and a government and parents and a neighborhood and 78 passwords that I MUST CHANGE IMMEDIATELY. I don't need difficult challenges in a hobby that's supposed to be fun. So I intentionally avoid trying to complete a tobacco mini set from 1904 or every 2016 parallel of Kris Bryant. My completion quests are much mor...

I'm sure this has happened to everyone. You leave your home. You reach your destination however many minutes later. And you realize that you have no memory of anything that happened on your travels in between. That's how occupied I was yesterday as I headed out to run a few errands. I had planned to find most of what I was looking for in Target so I could then use the Target baseball card coupons that I kept forgetting. I had also planned to stop at the ATM to break in a new debit card. But before I knew it, I was pulling into a parking spot at Walmart, of all places. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no," I said out loud in disgust as I realized where I was. I hadn't stopped at the ATM, I hadn't gone to Target where I had coupons. I was in the gross Walmart parking lot with absolutely no knowledge of how I got there. Also, I had forgotten my Target coupons. So, resigned to my fate, I opened the door and walked toward Walmart, past the broken down shopping carts...

I have never consciously attempted to complete a run of Topps flagship sets. As a set-collector, it just kind of happened. By happy accident, I've completed Topps sets from 1974 through 1989. I'm two cards away from completing 1972 and that will spur me on to tackle 1973. With 1971 Topps and 1991 Topps already finished, landing the '73 set would mean I would have an even 20 years worth of Topps sets completed, from 1971-1991. Except for one tiny issue. I've never tried nor wanted to complete the 1990 Topps set. I don't out-and-out hate the set, even though when I bought 1990 Topps for the first time that year, I wanted to throw them out as soon as I saw them. The 200 or so cards from that set I own sit in a binder, which means that someday, someway I may actually try to complete that set. Well "someday, someway" happened last week. A few weeks earlier I had been reading the blogs when I came across a post by Brad's Blog . He mentioned t...