Night Owl Cards

  I received an unexpected quick flyer in the mail last week from reader Grant. Of the variety of items in the envelope, very few were cards.   Just two, in fact. One was this 2025 Topps Cosmic Chrome Josh Allen card. I consider it good luck because the package arrived on Thursday, mere hours before Allen and the Bills beat up on the Lions defense. (I know, not difficult to do).   This was the other card, a Heritage buyback, a.k.a., someone/something stamped Rick Auerbach's 1976 Topps card.   This is just my second '76 Heritage buyback, as only 1975 cards get the collecting treatment in this house. But I certainly will take any stamped Dodgers, no matter the year.   And that was it for the cards.   But there was more and I consider it the highlight of the envelope.     Those are wax pack wrappers -- from my prime collecting time -- and a couple are from sets that I never collected as a kid -- because I never saw them for sale.   For informati...

    Today is Mrs. Night Owl's birthday. It's not easy to mix cards with her birthday. She just doesn't care about them. She's been great about my hobby all these years, never saying a word of complaint about it, the accumulating, the spending, the scattered cards that she might trip over, none of it.    She even was the first to suggest the card room, although I'm sure part of that was to make sure the cards were finally confined to one place. That's mostly succeeded. She does find some of my collecting interesting, and one of the few times I can grab her attention on cards is when I say, "guess what stupid price this card is going for?" That was a fun pandemic game. It doesn't happen quite as much anymore.  Other times I can get her card attention is when I find something that I know is related to her interests. Then there are times when I'm sorting cards and she'll walk past and comment on how she likes how a certain card looks, the desig...