Night Owl Cards

  Baseball season is essentially over, and football season has begun in my household. See: Sunday afternoon, when the Bills game dominated the TV and we turned over to the Guardians-Rays only after the Bills' win was done. (It was in the eighth inning).   So that means it's time for my one or two football posts out of the year.   I grabbed a couple of football cards from the Diamond Jesters Time Travel inventory last month, one from the 1980s -- Freeman McNeil there -- and one from the 1970s.   John Rowser from 1975.   This is how football cards come into my collection these days -- a card here and a card there, whether through the Time Travel Trading, something I find appealing at a card show or maybe landing a card from one of those social media selling sites.   There is very little intent behind those purchases. I'm not seeking the card out, I'm not building the set, it's just something that I enjoy, either the player or the design or something about it...

I may be an adult who collects trading cards but I don't like my trading cards to remind me I'm an adult.   Here's how:   Most of the cards I value, almost all my favorite sets and all my favorite players, come from three decades -- the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These are the cards that produce the greatest memories when I look through them in my collection.   But looking for memories after that gets a little dangerous. The 1990s is full of adult concerns, worries and incidents ... and all that angry music. I can say the same for the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Best just look at the cards and be done with it, don't start dredging up memories, you're not gonna like it.   So when I looked for cards that interested me in the latest Diamond Jesters' Time Travel Trading post, I instinctively picked cards from the '60s, '70s and '80s. I didn't even realize I was doing it. They were just naturally the ones that appealed to me.   '60s     First up, a 1961...

  I have the three cards that I claimed in the latest Diamond Jesters Time Travel Trade series to show off today.   They all have something in common, which I didn't realize when I was requesting them.     Each of the cards are from 1986. This is interesting to me. Out of all the years in the 1980s -- and  I have a lot of cards from that decade -- 1986 is the year that contains the most holes.   I look at cards from 1986 with some unfamiliarity. This goes back to where I was at in life at the time. As I've mentioned very often, '86 was the year I broke free from my card collecting ritual. For 10 years I made sure to purchase Topps cards (and then Donruss and Fleer) in some sort of fashion each year. But in 1986 I was away at college and didn't bother with cards, not even a little.   This is why I've long considered 1986 Topps as a "mysterious" set. When I was finally collecting it during the first year of this blog, I discussed how fascinated I was wi...

   In early May, I realized that it had been a long time since I had even looked at the baseballcardstore website .   In the past five years I've made purchased from there two or three times a year. It's a great place to find cheap cards and there's been the bonus of Steven sending cards my way just because or producing made-to-order Dodgers packages for me to grab at my convenience.   But as the site grew more popular I found less and less of interest. All the good stuff seemed to be snapped up right away. And there was another Dodgers super-collector who had discovered the site who was grabbing anything I wanted. Eventually I just stopped checking it out.   When I realized that it had been a year since I had placed an order I resolved to find stuff that fit my collecting interests. If I really tried, it shouldn't be that difficult. I like a lot of stuff. And the cards are cheap, so make an effort, night owl!   It took awhile -- so little time to devote an...