Night Owl Cards

  Card blogs are for showing off your own, very personal card interests. If nobody else cares about them it doesn't matter. That's why it's your blog. But I've made a blog living out of trying to make those very personal card interests about something with wider appeal. I consider it a challenge. Today, I'm all challenged-out. I have the rest of my COMC haul to show off, the non-Kershaw part. It's a variety. I can't wrap up all the items into one tidy subject, at least nothing I haven't written about before. So you're going to see them with no theme, no deep thoughts. It'll be just cards ... except the things that aren't cards ... that only I care about. Like so: These are a couple of cheap items in a modest attempt to boost my collection of Martina Hingis. She's my favorite tennis player, I should have at least a full page of her cards. Not cards but stickers, and only the greatest stickers ever made. I'm mostly talking to a wall whe...

  I have a couple of state-of-the-blog updates to make, nothing that's interesting enough to generate its own post, so let's get to it. 1. THE GIVEAWAY I thought that I would be at the stage of sending out cards this week, and it's still possible a couple of the first packages will go out by the weekend, but it's more likely it won't start until next week. I'm still gathering cards for the giveaway. It's one of those deals where you know 5,000 cards is a lot of cards but you don't truly know until you give away 5,000 cards. I've got more than 3,000 cards set aside and I'm working on deleting a few hundred more out of my TCDB inventory -- this is the real culprit in terms of me not sending out cards yet. Pretty much the dumbest time to run a card giveaway is in the middle of attempting to upload your whole collection on Trading Card Database. With the majority of my collection tied up in completed sets, or Dodgers, I headed back to Target to grab ...

Adult life is all about demands on your time. That's all it is, scrambling from one thing to the next, forgetting important dates or tasks or interests because your brain has run out of room. I've been dealing with it for years and complaining about it on the blog for a long time, too. But I didn't know anything until I reached 2019. Ever since my parents' passings, I've been attempting to catch up. There's still plenty of aftermath to handle, nowadays it's all about finances. I just got a call on a financial matter because I haven't tended to something basically because I've had no time. At the moment of that call, I felt like I was being pulled in 100 different directions. I even feel like I'm being pulled in too many directions with my collection, too. With all of my interests, I find it difficult to focus when I have a little cash. Recently I used a portion of my payment from my latest Beckett Vintage Collector article to hit up COMC...

I do not go along with the crowd. That's well-established. Both in the hobby and in life. For example, I do not take part in sales. This is very un-American of me, because wherever I go, inside of the hobby or out, there is someone mentioning how they "got a deal" on this or that. When I used to work in retail, there were legions of shoppers who'd wait for the weekly circular and then stampede to the mall to wipe out all the sale items before Sunday had ended. In the card hobby, I don't have to tell you it's all about finding a sale. Dollar boxes, quarter boxes, dime boxes, nickel boxes. Finding the best deal on ebay. Finding the best deal on your favorite online shopping site. Each year, my favorite site -- COMC -- announces several different sales. The most popular is the Black Friday sale. At that time of year, there is blog post after blog post showing off Black Friday purchases. But I've never taken part. It's not that I don't lik...