Night Owl Cards

  I received my first COMC order of the year Monday. I requested shipment on July 12 and it was originally slated to arrive in late August. Instead it showed up in 17 days. That's record time. During a period when ebay service is all over the map (yet I am hounded by PROVIDE FEEDBACK emails the second I receive an order), it's nice to see someone picking up the slack, especially with all the past complaints about COMC delays.   This COMC order is a reflection of my tour through various web sites, card blogs, social media, whatever. Whenever I saw a card that I liked, into the COMC cart it went. That means sometimes when I pulled a card out of the shipment I was like "what'd I order this for?" The only explanation is "human see, human do." I wanted the card at that time.   So here's a look at me jumping off a bridge just because everyone else did it.   Much of these knee-jerk orders involved Dodger cards. I couldn't tell you where or when I saw

  Set collectors know that it takes a long time to get to the completion finish line. For example, I'm very close to finishing off a set (probably in the next couple days) that has taken seven years to finish -- and it took even longer if you count those random cards from the set I had as a youth. But, yeah, seven years is nothing in the set-collecting world. I admit, I don't think about the length of time much. I probably wouldn't collect sets as avidly if I focused on the duration all the time. I do, however, note mini-milestones along the way to completion. I need those little celebrations and it provides a boost to keep going. For example, the card above is the final card I needed from the non-SP portion of the 2024 Topps Heritage set. Yay, mini-milestone! It arrived from the Shlabotnik Report . (I think that may be the first time I've received cards from him, which is wild). The same card also arrived again today, which I'll get to. Isn't that always the wa

    Ever since I dropped cable, I haven't viewed much of the Hall of Fame's annual induction ceremony, which used to be a regular must-watch.   I saw a little bit of it on YouTube the other day and watched as the players already in the Hall were introduced at the beginning. That's always a fun part. But for whatever reason I particularly noticed the HOFers who weren't there this time. Maybe it's because in previous viewings I was distracted, I just couldn't get over all of the Hall of Famers in one place. But this time I was noticing that several notables were missing, not just guys who are probably at that age that they just can't go wherever they want, such as Sandy Koufax and Carl Yastrzemski, but Reggie Jackson, Robin Yount, Carlton Fisk, Nolan Ryan, Wade Boggs, Rickey Henderson, Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux and others weren't there.   Maybe that's always the case and just something I focused on this year.   Every Hall of Fame card is treasured, t