Night Owl Cards

  This is the giveaway post featuring the extras from my winnings from The Diamond King vintage giveaway on his blog last month.   I'll reveal the cards I'm giving away and the entry instructions at the end of the post, so you greedy grubbies can scroll right to the end if you like.   But I wanted to mention that DK's giveaway also encouraged participants to send cards out themselves. This is something I still do, even after 18 years, though not as often the last 5 or 6 years (still there are cards on my desk right now that are waiting for packaging and sending, as it's always been). But Kevin seemed to strike a nerve as I was the beneficiary of three separate card sends that I believe were related to The Diamond King's request.   First let's see some cards I received from gcrl from cards as I see them . Neither of us needs instructions for sending out cards, especially to fellow Dodger fans, but we'll take any excuse!   Goodies of the parallel kind. Will g...

  What might that be? The Dodgers' second straight World Series title? The Bills' win over the infernal Patriots last weekend? Finally killing off the yellowjacket infestation underneath the siding in August?   Nah.   My biggest win of the year was landing the prize in the vintage giveaway over at The Diamond King a couple of weeks ago. In keeping with the season, DK has been giving away a bunch of cards from his collection. I waited out the numbered and prospect lots and I was rewarded. Vintage! Sweet, sweet vintage.   As a veteran vintage collector, I saw cards in the lot that I already owned, but that didn't stop me from entering because there were several cards I didn't own, including cards on freshly made want lists! Plus, I could always do a giveaway myself with the extras.   There was so much variety in this group that it took me awhile to figure out how to present it here. I'm still not sure that this won't turn out to be rambling without any direction...

  This has been a weird holiday week as far as working my job. In general, holidays don't mean much in the journalism world, the news doesn't stop and newspapers come out every day (mostly). But my paper has always been good about holidays and I often am able to take some time off. Not this year. I worked on Christmas. Not unusual but not ritual either. I also worked on New Year's Day. Both of those are very common days to have off in the general work world. Also I did a little work on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve even though I was technically off. Meanwhile, my work computer decided to stop working two days before Christmas. Apparently it wanted a vacation, too. And good luck getting someone to look at it during the holiday week. I've been working from home ever since. I could go on and on but to sum up, I feel like I'm the only one working the last 10 days. I'm a little sick of it. So what we have here is a lazy write-up on some cards that came to my d...

  The card blogging scene has ebbed and flowed during the 15 years that I have been doing this. It's gone from sensation to "so-uncool" to consistently and always there. Blogging about cards isn't going away, no matter how much it gets dismissed or ignored.   Aside from writing about cards, which has always been the why, one of the very few constants in all that blogging time is giveaways.   From Tribe Cards to Johnny's Trading Spot, the generosity is off the chart for blogs. I don't care what Twitter says with its RAKs and "hobby fams" (lordy, that phrase is annoying), nothing has the history that blogs do for sending off cards just because.   Sometimes months go by without some sort of giveaway and then all of a sudden they're back, two, three, four at a time. The prize hounds know this, too. Often the only time I see a comment from certain someones is when there's something in it for them.   But I do try to win cards, too -- I just make su...