Night Owl Cards

As in "certain" that this card is now in my collection. The Nebulous 9 is now down to a mere six cards. That's both due to my laziness in adding more wants and a sudden blitz on the list by fellow collectors. I've received four cards from the Nebulous 9 in the last couple weeks, including this mere 1989 Topps checklist, which came from cynical buddha . Now I can add it to the '89 binder with the rest of the unchecked checklists and everything will match. We must feed the OCD monster. Here are two other cards that came with the checklist: Two ugly Gypsy Queens (although the inserts are just a tiny bit pretty). I need one more base card Dodger and then you can expect never to see these cards on the ever blog again -- unless I'm doing an end-of-the-year post about which set most resembles the outside of a 12th century asylum for the criminally insane. Thanks, CB! This former Nebulous 9 need -- a 2002 Fleer Greats Maury Wills -- arrived fr...

I saw my first pack searcher last week. Yup, really. First one. Apparently you people who encounter pack searchers every other week live in areas with lawless card aisles. But our mamas raised us right up here. But this wasn't the typical pack searching scene. And I apologize in advance for what I'm about to relay. I was in Target, shopping for something else. So I was coming from the back of the store. That means that when I turn into the card aisle, I can't see whether anyone is standing there. However, I can SENSE whether someone is standing there. How pathetic have I become? I actually know whether people are shopping for cards before I can see them. So I go to make my turn into the aisle and the first thing I see is that there are two people together shopping for cards. The second thing I see is a butt crack. A female butt crack. It's two girls. The butt crack girl is seated on the ground, doing terrible things to a pack of cards. The second girl is st...

(A quote from magazine and newspaper editor and novelist E.W. Howe: "The greatest humiliation in life is to work hard on something from which you expect great appreciation, and then fail to get it." Preach on, brother!! Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 136th in a series): A card collector encounters many firsts in his hobby journey. First card pulled. First card purchased. First card of a favorite player. First card of a favorite team. First rookie card. First autograph card. First card with a piece of stadium seat god knows why. This card here is a card from my first retro set. It came out in 1977, long before the retro craze of the first decade of the 21st century. It has been a long time since I have thought about the 1977 TCMA Galasso Greats set. TCMA produced the set for card dealer giant Renata Galasso, and it was issued 45 cards at a time, every year or so through 1984. My brother got in on the ground floor by ordering up the first set from 1977....

My blog is a happy oasis away from the idiocy that I deal with in everyday life. I work damn hard in just about everything that I do, but it doesn't seem to pay off a lot of the time. It pays off more often with my blog. The blog is my baby, my creation, and I try to make sure it's working as smoothly as I can. The successes on Night Owl Cards far outweigh the failures. But there is one issue that my diligence can't seem to fix. I have received complaints periodically that it takes a long time for my blog to load. At first I shrugged off these comments. Anything worth having is worth waiting for, right? Besides, this blog was for me, not anyone else and their damn computer. But as blogging continued to connect me with collectors around the country and beyond, I began to place greater importance in what others had to say, to the extent that the periodic complaints of the "slow-loading" Night Owl Cards started to bother me. Finally, I decided to do somethi...