Night Owl Cards

If you've been reading this blog for more than a year or so, you know that there is no busier time of year for me than March. This is not a month for taking a trip down south, touring spring training sites, or participating in 27 different NCAA basketball pools. "March Madness" is the most appropriate title for the third month of the year and college basketball is only a tiny part of the story. But two-thirds of the way through the month I start to see some relief. There's still much to do, and high school sports is more relentless and endless than ever (thanks a lot, moms and dads), but when the first day of spring arrives, I know that things will get easier. Today is the first day of spring. I feel like celebrating. It's time to slam everybody with a massive spring cleaning trade dump! Come on! It'll be fun! You should see the card desk. The "in" and "out" boxes are a disaster. I can barely keep them separated. And my const...

I have "watched" this year's postseason without a working television. In fact, tonight is the first night in which I'll be able to actually see and hear what everyone else is seeing and hearing, images of and commentary about players at the ballpark doing extraordinary things. This has happened because I got myself so twisted over my cable box -- and the new and different box the cable company gave to me -- that they finally had to send a tech guy out to save me. And he also fixed a few more things for me (at no charge, I made sure of that), and now my techy things are working better than ever. I got into this situation because I'm a low-tech guy and I don't really have the knowledge or right kind of brain to operate in what's increasingly an exclusively high-tech world. I turned toward writing at an early age because I knew, after trying and failing in a new world called "computer science," that I was much better at the arts than the sc...

Ever since I was a budding collector, I have been ever-vigilant about preventing doubles from invading my collection. It's obsessive, I know. And at the rate that cards arrive in my mailbox, it is now also a little pointless. But, still, I can't shake the mind-set: filter the dupes, filter the dupes, filter the dupes. My Dodgers collection is rather advanced at this point so the routine that I go through every time a package arrives in the mail is pretty important. Upon opening the package, I shuffle through the cards and place cards I know I need in one stack and doubles in another, separating the wheat from the chaff if you want to get biblical about it. "Got it, got it, need it" will be a prevailing thought process as long as I'm collecting, and I've got this routine down cold. I'm pretty good at it, although I'm extra wary about any card from the mid-to-late '90s or early 2000s. So, I went through the ritual again in my first trade w...