Night Owl Cards

This year is the first year that my daughter will not be trick-or-treating since she was a baby. And there goes my only reason for recognizing Halloween. I do like the holiday, mostly because I really should be 499 pounds and I dearly love chocolate. I also like seeing the little kids running around in their costumes and orange glow-in-the-dark flashlights. I live in a neighborhood that is a trick-or-treating mecca. People practically bus kids in from the country to go trick-or-treating where I live. There are rugrats everywhere. But that's about the extent of my holiday revelry. I haven't dressed up in a costume since I was 12 (I don't count what passed for clothing in the '80s). And I don't get horror films. I am never in the mood to be freaked out or repulsed. So that just wastes my time. Without a kid to shuffle from house to house on the only day when it's socially acceptable to beg for food, I'll just head to work, where you wipe away the holida...

Finest is one of those sets that I love but can never get near. It's always sitting in some card shop miles from me, both in terms of distance and price range, making nasty faces because it knows that I can't get to it. So when there's a group break that includes Finest, I'm there. A Cardboard Problem announced a Finest break a long, long time ago -- back when everyone thought the Phillies were going to run away with the World Series -- and I jumped immediately on the Dodgers, with visions of cool, colored refractors and maybe a funky patch so I could hypnotize people who are impressed by that kind of thing. Well, the break finally happened after Topps finished goofing around with what it was going to do with the set (oooooooh, more rookies. Thank goodness. There just aren't enough of those on cards). I chalked it up to another "worth the wait" situation. But while Marie and Sooz made the wait worth it by throwing in some extra cards, Finest did not....