Night Owl Cards

I am a big believer in the saying, "if you want something done right, do it yourself." To some, that is the mark of a control freak, someone who can't delegate, not a team player. I am probably guilty of some of that although I don't think I make it too obvious. I don't like that I'm such a big believer in that saying. It's just that it keeps proving itself true over and over. The last couple of days I've been consumed by a work project. It's a lot of effort, requires quite a bit of input from a variety of people, and there are many elements to it, with lots of scheduling involved. The people under my direction have it down like clockwork. They write quality stories, meet deadlines, provide the right photos. It's the people who are not under my control who repeatedly dropped the ball the last two days. I can't help but notice that. That probably means I'm not noticing when people out of my control do their jobs, but serious...

Have you ever wished that you could budget the events that happen in certain months like you do an insurance or electric bill? I certainly do. The first two months I would attack would be March and October. Why must those two months continually hurl time-consuming, energy-sapping activities/tasks at you so that you have no idea what date it is, what day, sometimes even what hour? High school playoff games, on top of the baseball postseason, on top of the NFL, on top of work upheaval and restructuring, on top of seasonal change activities, on top of emergency home repairs. Spread it out a little! Usually my down time includes hobby activity or low-key game viewing or random household activities. But in October, if you have a team in the postseason, virtually all of one's downtime is spent pacing in front of the TV. The last two innings of last night's Dodgers-Nationals NLDS-deciding game, I barely sat down. You know that feeling you get when you're in that room wa...

I think I put on a decent show here, but fact is I'm struggling. It's August, which is Don't Buy a Damn Card Month around here. That not only holds up buying new product, but outgoing card packages stagnate on the desk, and all of that together really cuts down on blog material. I'm forced to use my wiles in order to continue to crank out blog posts. I have to be resourceful. You know, like an owl. I've been rationing any trade posts because the incoming packages are dwindling (when you don't send out much, you don't get much). I never want to be a blog that only operates when new cards arrive in the collection, but I admit, it's difficult to stay open on a day-to-day basis when I haven't seen the inside of Target for a month, don't bother going on ebay, and the mailbox features only PWETCBs (Plain White Envelopes That Contain Bills). But enough whining, let's see a few cards that were sent to me by Judson at My Cardboard Habit . I...

I don't know about you, but for me No vember has been a weird month, both on the blog and elsewhere. For one, readership always goes down in November. Always. It's been that way since I first figured out you could calculate such things. I don't know why that is. The weather is almost always crap in November, you'd think people would focus on more sedentary activities. Second, a lot of people either stop talking about or paying attention to baseball cards in November, which might be the answer to the paragraph above. I'm a baseball guy, so I'll never stop talking about baseball cards just because the season's over. But I guess some people do. Third, I'm broke in November. Well, I'm broke a lot of other months out of the year these days, but no money in November has been a constant for the last six years. Finally, it gets odd for people in November. I don't know if people sense they're getting to the end of the year and they assess t...

I'm assuming this happens to everyone, but there are songs running through my head constantly. Often times I'll wake up with a song in my head and have no idea how it got there. Some songs pop into my head more than others and often it's so random and so familiar that I don't realize it's going through my head until hours or maybe even a day or two after it first appeared. One of the songs that makes a repeated appearance is the old Police song, "When the World Is Running Down You Make the Best of What's Still Around." The song is from their 1980 album Zenyatta Mondatta, the one with "Don't Stand So Close To Me" and "De Do Do Do De Da Da Da." My brother had the cassette and I was familiar with all the songs on the album in no time. "When the World Is Running Down" is natural head music because its repetitive chord progression is so catchy (it's been called "hypnotic"). But I also find myself hu...