Night Owl Cards

  It's been more than a year since I did one of these. There are reasons for that: These posts are brutally time-consuming and I should do posts like this in shifts, but I haven't learned to do that. Also, I'm covering a time period in which I didn't collect and also a time period in which set-collecting was going out of style.   But I'm plowing through, at least for another year.   It's 1997 and that sound you hear is me opening a single pack of Topps and thinking "well, that's enough of that."  That's all I did in collecting in 1997. But it was more than I did in 1996, which was absolutely nothing! For me, 1997 is about taking a job that I still have and preparing for the arrival of our first kid. All to the theme of "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down." (Yeah, I know, you hate that song). Like in 1996, far too many sets were issued in 1997 and a whole bunch of them couldn't even muster 4...

  I hit the road for the fourth time in a week yesterday, wrapping up my vacation with a card show. Interestingly, I did the exact same thing at this time last year, and just like last year, Angus, of Dawg Day Cards , joined me. It's the perfect way to finish off a vacation, because usually I'm in a downer mood that final day and a show is the perfect pick-me-up. There's nothing like a card show. There's nothing like it to get your mind off of despair and drudgery and there's nothing like it for, well, a lot of things.  Let's explore.   There's nothing like a card show to get you out of bed early   The show at the state fairgrounds has been starting and ending earlier than in the past. They also have that VIP thing now in which you can show up even earlier for whatever exclusives I don't care about enough to lose sleep for.   But since this show came during my vacation, there was no late-night shift the previous night. We could get started a whole hour e...

You guys all remember John , don't you? The guy who ran Old School Breaks? He said goodbye to us a year or so ago. But he's still around. He's still collecting, but he's looking to lighten his hobby load, as many of us are doing. John recently sent me a generous stack of cards from his Old School wheelhouse, the late '90s. John was one of the first bloggers to introduce me to the concept of the late '90s being "old school." I remember the first time I heard this, and I thought, "holy crap, I might be too old for these people. The late '90s were just LAST WEEK." But I learned to adjust, adopted some of the lingo, and there are even days when I consider 1997 as positively prehistoric. Speaking of 1997, John sent me this card from that ancient year: Are you seeing what I'm seeing? A card labeled a "Diamond Cut"? A diecut card labeled a "Diamond Cut"? With a shiny, sparkly diamond design at the top of th...