Night Owl Cards

  Sorry, sports fans, I'm carrying out on my threat to compare Allen & Ginter owl cards. If I don't do it, who will? Owls have been a traditional A&G subject since the original sets in the 1880s. The card above is from the 1888 A&G Birds of America set (no, it's not mine, yes, I should look into collecting these). A&G, I think, was the first card set to feature owls, at least according to TCDB. There was a Beautiful Birds of America set in 1886 but they didn't consider owls beautiful apparently . Since the A&G reboot in 2006, an owl hasn't appeared on a base card but keeps popping up in insert sets. This is owlie's first arrival in the 2010 A&G set, as part of the National Animals mini insert theme. It flew in all the way from the Dominican Republic for an appearance. The next time owls appeared in A&G was five years later in the Birds of Prey mini insert set. I made certain I found those owls. There are three of them. There are 10 ca...

I feel like I have certain responsibilities with my hobby. One is to try to keep a relatively tidy "work" station. There are other people in the house. They don't need to see my scattered piles of team bags, toploaders, mailers, receipts, etc., never mind that all of it combined gives me endless joy. They can only see what's in front of them. But when cards stack up, even I get bent out of shape. I keep stacks of cards for the current year (2016 cards), as well as stacks of incoming and outgoing cards. Anything beyond that I try to store as soon as I am able. There are a bunch of cards that have been sitting out, unattended, for quite a while. They are all non-regulation-size cardboard, the vast majority Ginter mini size or postcard size. I ran out of pages for those cards a long time ago, and I enjoy buying boxes of pages as much as I enjoy buying socks. It's a necessity I put off til I can't puts it off no more. So I decided to do something about it...

That early bird is an idiot. Who needs worms? Late is great. At least it is when it comes to cards. While everyone is hyperventilating over the newest card product, driving up prices on all the newness, being late has its advantages. But first the backstory: I am not anywhere near completing my 2015 Allen & Ginter set. I still haven't finished 2014 A&G yet (*grumble, grumble, shortprints, grumble, grumble*). But when I started seeing signs of 2016 A&G appearing in stores, I knew I had to do my own tour. I hadn't planned on doing it. But then Stale Gum posted on Twitter that he spotted 2016 A&G in Plattsburgh, of all places, with photographic evidence . Plattsburgh is about three hours from me and even more remote than where I live. If '16 A&G was in Plattsburgh, it had to be here. We headed out to dinner and to do a little shopping afterward. I asked my daughter whether we'd find A&G in Target or Walmart. She immediately said, "...

Here is another saying that I never understood: "everything from soup to nuts." For years I had no idea where that originated. Why were soup and nuts polar opposites? Was nuts the hardest thing you could eat and soup the softest? I was reaching, but what else could it be? What a weird saying. So I finally looked it up. It turns out it comes from what was considered a full course meal back in the day. You eat soup at the start of the meal, you eat some sort of nutty dessert at the end of the meal. Soup to nuts and everything in between. So there you are. That wasn't nearly as interesting as I thought it would be. But it does sum up a tidy package of cards I received from Robert and his blog $30 a Week Habit. Robert has recently moved and is now throwing 20s and 10s around in sunny warm climes while I've officially started hunkering. I received a package that basically spanned the breadth of my collecting choices -- from the oldest item I'm focusing on to...

All right, you've read at least two posts from me documenting how 2015 Allen and Ginter hasn't impressed me, how I've slowly grown disinterested in it the last couple of years, and, oh, won't I just stop whining and collect what I want to collect. OK, this is me whining one last time. With one last statement. I'm out. After 2015, I'm not collecting Allen & Ginter anymore. I can't do it. I've realized that with my budget, if I want to complete a set from a particular year, I have to pick one set and that's it. That's all the money I have. If I also want to continue to pursue cards from past sets and vintage interests then I have to cut it off at one set per year. This year, A&G is running a distant third in terms of sets that I like behind flagship and Stadium Club. There's no way I can collect all three, and even attempting to complete two is causing me to collect both flagship and Stadium Club very inefficiently. I need ...