Night Owl Cards

I think I've figured out a temporary work-around with my temperamental scanner that will allow me to scan items until I can get a new one, or at least fix the current one. So you should be seeing freshly-scanned cards in the posts to come. But meanwhile, I'm taking advantage of a post by Shoebox Legends a week or so ago in which he cleared out his scan folder of images and magically created new content! I can't think of any more perfect time to create such a post than when your scanner is on the blink! Normally, I don't have a lot of leftover scans (I certainly don't have all the spare autographs and fancy stuff I saw in Fuji's "I Just Had These Lying Here" post). Pretty much everything that I scan winds up showing up on Night Owl Cards. But I managed to scare up a few images that will generate some words from me. Some of these pictures were dedicated to posts that never were, some never made a post I wrote. I guess they were cut for time ....

There is a well-known line of dialogue in the old "Mad Men" TV series in which the main character, Don Draper, is berated by his latest love interest, who says that he can never commit to anything because he "only likes the beginnings of things." Like the best of television shows, that line has stayed with me for a long time and has led to periodic self-cross-examination. However, I have also found that often -- maybe more often -- I like the ends of things. More importantly, I like the ends of things when I'm still around to see the end. Yep, what I'm saying is we've reached the end of my least favorite month again, and I'm celebrating because I'm still alive. Honestly, I don't know why we have to stuff every conceivable life activity into the third month of the year every year. The biggest sports tournament of the year. Holidays. High school sports championships of every stripe and color. Birthdays abounding. Mid-terms. Special...

As you might know, I used to be on Twitter. But like salmon swimming upstream, I got out of there while everyone else in the world was getting in. I'm still active on Twitter on a professional level. Dispensing information, receiving information. It's invaluable. It works for me on that level. But not on the personal level. I guess I prefer my facts in short snippets, while I want my opinions in long, meandering blog posts. When I left Twitter, I left a number of card collectors who also have blogs but prefer Twitter. They're still there now, and most don't update their blogs very much anymore. That's OK, I guess, but I miss them. Trading with those folks has dwindled down to zero. Another unfortunate bi-product of being a blog-only collector (I don't do the forums either). But just the other day, a card package arrived from one of the more active collector twitterers that I know. Greg/@grogg sent me some cards that he claimed were long overdue. I d...