Night Owl Cards

  At the start of the year the last couple of years I've mentioned that it'd be nice if I completed the 1982 Donruss set. It hasn't been much of a priority because I like other card things a lot more, but '82 Donruss is one of the few traditional sets from my collecting youth that I had not finished. It's seemed like a must-do for awhile. I knew the best route to get the set finished was to just buy it all at once. Fifty or sixty bucks ought to do it. To get myself focused I placed the stack of 1982 Donruss I already had at the corner of my card desk, where I could see it every single day. There it is. I see that stack as soon as I walk into the card room and I walk into that room multiple times a day. You can see that it's a healthy stack and that's one of the reasons why it's taken me so long to do anything about it. With more than half of the set already in my possession, that's a lot of dupes if I order a full set. So, that stack has been sitting

  Last month when I received a very kind delivery of free cards from the baseballcardstore.ca , I resolved to get on the site quickly and pay for some cards to show my appreciation. I sort of succeeded ... until Steven from the baseballcardstore jumped in and thought he could help me with my effort by finding more stuff for me, even better than I could, that would fit perfectly into my collection.   Let me tell you how that happened.   I started on the site like I always did, by searching for various sets. That's hit-and-miss for me because most of the sets available on there aren't what I'm looking for, as you can imagine as a vintage guy. I also look for Dodgers I need, which is even more difficult, because I have a lot of Dodgers.   So the set search began, and without coming up with any 1985 Donruss baseball, I decided -- heck, might as well pursue some cards from the set I've been avoiding all my life.   Yeah, this thing -- the thing I've been making fun of fo

  It's fairly apparent that the world now thinks of the 1980s as "ye olden times." I spent much of the past weekend watching baseball and anyone who grew up in that decade can't help but recognize the 1980s pop songs now passing for commercial jingles. Fleetwood Mac's "Everywhere" is selling Kohl's products, REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling" hawks Tums antacid. This isn't a new phenomenon, it's been going on for years, but it seems rampant now. Businesses are trying to capitalize on the nostalgia factor used so successfully in "Stranger Things," and even people who didn't grow up in the '80s admit that there may have been no other decade with more catchy pop songs than the '80s. How do you explain the retro-appreciation for songs like "Take On Me," "Africa" and "Here I Go Again"? I am proud to have lived through the '80s -- not merely as a kid -- but as a teen

    I haven't had much money to spend on cards the last three or four months. In fact, there's a card show this weekend and I ain't going. It's quite the contrast to earlier in the year when I was throwing money at 1956 Topps all-stars. But there are a couple new bills to pay and if I'm going to unearth some cash on cards it's certainly not going to be the new stuff. A few weeks ago I started to feel like I should live up to my name as a collector and see what the baseballcardstore had in stock. Even someone on a strict budget can afford to throw a few dimes at some cards. I was surprised to find that the dimebox store has become a nickelbox store. In order to compensate for the crazy shipping costs, the site's owners have moved to tiered shipping prices, and although those are higher than what was once on the site, they've knocked back the price on their cards to a NICKEL. By the time I added up the cards I bought and the new shipping price, it was no