Night Owl Cards

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...

Attention! We've got a lot to cover today, so bring your bottled water, some comfortable socks and focus on what I have to say because I'm not saying it twice. Here we go: OMISSION I received some cards from my wife for Easter. Yes, Easter. How many times to do I have to tell you that I'm way behind? It was a rack pack of Heritage, which is very odd to see Heritage in rack pack form. She did very well with the pack selection, because out emerged two of the very latest Dodgers: Nobody's fooling me that those are actual Dodgers uniforms that they're wearing, but I won't complain because this is an antiquated hobby and the alternative is collecting virtual cards online, which I hate to break the spell here, is preventing you from obtaining real cards. Think about it. Gotta stay focused in this hobby. The rest of the Heritage cards were your usual, although one little bit of something stood out: Yikes. No, no, not Mesoraco himself. The sigh...

I just received another gift of 2012 Allen & Ginter from the very, very busy Nachos Grande . He's practically completing the set for me with these packages. With this third edition of cards sent my way, I'm down to needing 89 more cards to finish the set. That's pretty good for someone who didn't buy a box of A&G this year. In fact, I'm just about at the stage where buying another blaster of this stuff is a waste of money. I mean I couldn't even use the cards I get from it for blog material. Nobody wants to see A&G anymore. So here, real quick, are the cards I got from Chris: Blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You barely looked at them, didn't you? Me, too, even when I was opening the package. Not because I'm ungrateful or anything. In fact, I did a little dance around the back 40 when I learned I could erase more numbers off of my A&G want list. You should have seen the neighbors' faces. With every car...

Hey, there. If I haven't said so before, I happen to be a guy. How ya doin'? Since I have that Y chromosome, I do notice when attractive women walk by on my trading cards. It doesn't happen a lot, which makes it all the more intriguing when it does. I'm not one of those collectors who collects women on cardboard. I figure if I was that interested, I'd just get a subscription to Glamour or ... um ... something. Besides, there is no way my wife is going to allow something like Benchwarmer  within a two-block radius of the house. But I have to admit, it's nice to see a female presence once in a while within my male-dominated world of baseball card collecting. Honestly, staring at dudes on cardboard doesn't seem all that healthy when you think about it (it really started getting weird in the '90s when everyone was taking off their shirts to pose for cards). It's nice to come across someone who is a lot less ... uh, hairy ... periodically. ...