Night Owl Cards

Each year, when I make the determination that I am not going to attempt to complete that year's Topps base set -- which has been every year lately -- I go about organizing the cards in order by team. This way, it's easier for me to find cards if I am trading. Also, there is just something pleasing about categorizing cards by team that goes back to my childhood. You can assemble them by their respective divisions, in alphabetical order or by which ones you wish would die in a bear trap. The possibilities are endless. And if the set is particularly colorful, as it is this year, you get the neat effect above. That picture is just as pretty as all get-out. This is how I had assembled my cards for 2015 Topps, but all the while I had this nagging feeling that it wasn't quite the way they should be arranged. Today, I decided to do something about it. See if you can guess, by the pictures, what I am doing now. That's right. Yeah, I have no idea why ...

(A quote about appreciation from Mark Twain: "To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with." I think that translates to card collecting and this community of collectors quite well. This is Cardboard Appreciation, the 188th in a series): That nagging cough. You've had it for weeks. You really should go to the doctor. But it's just a cough, it'll go away eventually, right? Or it could be a sign of a terminal illness. Fortunately, the consequences of ignoring the warning signs in baseball card collecting aren't quite as dire. But they can be frustrating. For me, a freshly completed set, just placed in a binder, is akin to that nagging cough. I complete sets in a certain way. When I'm fairly certain that I want to complete a set and am a couple hundred cards away from finishing it, I'll go ahead and put the cards that I have in a binder, leaving spaces for where the missing cards will go. Then as I acquire cards, I add th...