Night Owl Cards

It's been a very slow week at the mailbox. Just a solitary card package at the start of the week and then your usual assortment of boredom. I'm entirely to blame for this. It's much too busy in life to be ordering, packaging or sending cards. My want list remains in disarray after its disappearance almost two months ago. So I'm not exactly making myself welcome for people thinking of sending me cards. Also, there is this: I have a lot of cards. I can't tell you how many. I haven't figured that out yet. Let's just say "too many." Blogging for almost a decade will do that. So it's a little difficult to find something from my incomplete want list. But I encourage you, dear trade partner, to keep trying. Because I know better than anyone that I definitely need many, many cards. You never know when something is going to slip through. Let's take the one card package to brave my mailbox this week, for example. It arrived from Tony at ...

When I coerced UltraPro into making pages to house 1975 Topps-style minis and then somehow got them to send me a box of the new pages , I knew it wouldn't be long before the guilt would set in. My primary goal in getting these pages made was so I could store my 1975 Topps mini collection, which is now three cards away from completion. That collection is now stored in those free pages and ... I have a few leftover. What do I do with the leftovers? And -- here is where the guilt comes in -- will I ever need more of these mini style pages? I eased my guilty thoughts by quickly storing some 1970s Kellogg's 3-D cards in the remaining mini pages, knowing that I would likely be pursuing more Kellogg's cards in the near future. But at the achingly slow rate that I am adding cards to my collection, when would I ever need to buy more mini pages for the cause? Enter Tony of Off Hiatus Baseball Cards , who reminded me that '75-style minis are here to stay in many diff...

I received a PWE in the mail from Tony of Off Hiatus Baseball Cards . The above request to the USPS was on the front. When I send out PWEs, I'm not quite as direct. I put a little line at the bottom on the back that says "nonmachinable" and cross my fingers. Since I haven't received any complaints, I'm assuming that does the trick. Maybe the USPS gets stirred up by exclamation points. Because this is what arrived in the mailbox: No. Not the black boxes. I placed those there. Please focus your attention on the rip that begins north and travels all the way south. Imagine that you can see the continuation of the rip underneath the black box. Now imagine seeing the envelope wide open at the center and the contents visible out in the mailbox. "Hoo-boy," I said to myself. "This isn't good." It turns out it was just fine. The cards were stored in one-third of a nine-pocket page, cut length-wise. That is the page folded ove...