Night Owl Cards

All of your favorite self-help sources say it's best to live in the present. Living in the past is not recommended. They say it stunts your growth. It skews your view on what's going on around you. It's unproductive. Living in the future is also frowned upon. They say you're wishing your life away. But, frankly, when it comes to cards, living in the present is pretty damn boring. At least it is for me. Your mileage may vary. I would much rather live in the past when it comes to cards. I like the old cards better, I have more connection to them. Cards from the past make a whole lot more sense to me than cards from the present. So, I'm stunting my growth? So what? Everyone knows we're not going to live forever, right? Might as well enjoy what you like. (I'm talking strictly cards here, those of you looking at me for permission to break your diet). But for just this one post, I'm living in the present. I promise not to nod off if you promise no...

When you get to a certain age, you are constantly aware of how little time there is. And, if you've played your life cards in a certain manner, you know that there are four important categories in your life. And figuring out a way to devote the proper amount of time to all four at the same time is life's greatest mystery. Faith, family, work and health -- go ahead -- try to spend time equally on each. It's almost impossible. I've found I can handle three of them perfectly well, but I have to ignore the fourth to do it. There are just not enough hours in the day to devote to all four in equal fashion. So that requires choices: which very important element of my life am I going to ignore today? All four require one's absolute attention. If you ignore one of them, you are sure to get a heap of shit for it at some point. So I spend most of my time ignoring one out of necessity, juggling the one I ignore to spread out the neglect a little, and then making it u...

I suffered yesterday one of the great misfortunes that can happen to a modern-day card collector. A web browser crash ate my want lists. All of them. They're all gone. I'm not sure how it happened. I was updating the want lists with some cards that arrived in the last couple of days. I closed the file and then returned to my list of posts. That's when I got the rotating "loading" circle and -- wap -- the browser crashed. When I opened the blog back up and went to my want lists page, it was empty. Years of work and 60 years of want lists gone. The Internet Wayback Machine wasn't much help. It could retrieve my want lists from April of last year, but that would mean trying to track down a year's worth of updating and that didn't sound attractive at all. Shockingly, what did sound attractive was starting up my want lists from scratch. So that's what I'm doing. 2017 wants are already up and I've started on 2016. I've also j...

I received exactly four cards from The Lost Collector recently. All four cards were of Dodgers. All four cards were of infielders. All four cards were cards that I needed. Do you know how difficult that is to do? Send me just four cards, of Dodgers, and have each one fill a hole? That's operating on a whole other level. I'll start with 2015 Jimmy Rollins here. Those of you who know my collecting ways might be questioning my above statements already after thinking I must have this card already. And after becoming slightly concerned that you know and care that much about my collection, I would say: "Ha! It's a trick! It's not a 2015 Topps Jimmy Rollins card at all!" It's a 2015 Topps TEAM SET Jimmy Rollins card! This is an important difference in the crazy, padded room world of baseball card collecting in which we team collectors reside. Second card. Another former Philadelphian. This card also resembles a flagship card. Howeve...