Night Owl Cards

  OK, I'm back to the big box of cards-and-such from Johnny's Trading Spot . This is the baseball portion of the box. I'm still not done sorting through it. He sent two long boxes packed with Dodger cards. Apparently one box used to house a 1985 Fleer set? I just completed that set a couple months ago, I'd still rather complete it traditionally than buy the whole thing at once, although for what I want that's left from the '80s, I may be done with traditional means. So with all those Dodgers -- a lot of them from the '90s and early '00s -- I'm on round two of going through the boxes because you miss those dumb parallels and other things. It's actually quite fun finding stuff the second time. There are a bunch of parallel needs now. The color parallels like the Gypsy Queen Jansen jump right out at me, but stuff like the '96 Stadium Club Martinez and the '96 Fleer glossy thingies (there was a lot of '96 in those boxes) got past me until...

I'm dealing with a firestorm at work that could only be created by the internet. So I don't have a lot of time. But I do want to mention that my want list tab has returned to the blog! It was just the other day that I discovered it was missing. It went something like this: "Well, cover me in shaving cream and douse me with bubble gum! What happened to the want list?" I don't remember if I took it down after the great want list erasing fiasco or know how long it had been gone. But it now has returned to its rightful spot. It's still woefully incomplete, but at least now I know why people were sending me emails that included the phrase "now that you don't have a want list ..." Geez, what kind of operation am I running here? Despite me actively discouraging people from checking out my want list, some still found it. One of them was John from Johnny's Trading Spot . He sent a bunch of shiny cards, many of which were on the want lis...

Earlier today, The Lost Collector posted about a card package sent to his old address that somehow made it to his new address three months later. I happened to send that package. Sorry about the wrong address, I just can't keep up. It's interesting that the cards did end up making it to him anyway and underlines the chaos that's going on in our lives -- or at least my life -- as we have the audacity to try to send cards to people and the gall to actually believe that they're going to end up in those people's collections while the world is swirling and spitting at us 24 hours a day. So I have my own "the cards almost didn't make it" story. A week ago, I posted about some cards that Justin of The Hopeful Chase sent me. A bunch of minis, mostly Dude minis. That -- I thought -- was that. I gathered up those cards, put them in the "to be cataloged" stack on my desk and threw the mailer into the recycling bin. There the envelope sat fo...

Not a lot of cards have come to the house the last couple of weeks. It's that end-of-the-year busy time, and money is devoted to various holiday expenses instead of cards. As mentioned before, I don't get involved with the Black Friday hobby deals, because spending money on myself at this time is not recommended if I know what's good for me. I have just two cards on my desk that I have received that are waiting to be shown. Each arrived as a one-card package. Each has a tale to tell. The first is a jersey card of Jim Kelly sent to me by Matt of Bob Walk The Plank . It is my first jersey card of Kelly, and probably only my second or third jersey card of an NFL player ever. My NFL collecting is very limited. But if you're going to throw a jersey at me, make it of the quarterback when I covered the Bills back in the late 1980s. This card is from 2006 Donruss Elite. The back assures that this swatch was taken from an actual jersey worn by Jim Kelly in an offic...

Maybe about four years ago, I declared relic cards as past-their-prime, not-to-be-trusted and generally not collectible anymore. I said that they had lost their pull on me. I pared down my collection of Dodger relics and waited for relics to die an inglorious death. It didn't happen. Relic cards are still being made and still making their way into my collection. These two relics from 2016 Allen & Ginter arrived unannounced from Nachos Grande just last week. They're still making these things, huh? The difference from four years ago is that I don't pursue relic cards anymore and haven't for four years. I also think -- although I have nothing to base it on outside of my own collection -- that there aren't as many relic cards issued as there were seven or eight years ago. As an example, Adrian Gonzalez is a mid-level star that in the heyday of relicdom would have jersey cards that could clothe the earth. But this relic is just my second Adrian Gonzalez...

I am much more partial to blue refractors than any other color refractor that exists in the Topps Chrome parallel menu. Not only is it my favorite color, but it is the color of my favorite sports team. The Dodgers go spectacularly well with blue refractors. I was particularly happy with the blue refractors from 2007-2012 because the deep blue color selected matched the Dodgers' color scheme (they possess the perfect blue -- not too dark and not too light). That is why I favor blues over any color refractor, regardless of rarity. A blue refractor could lack a serial number and a gold refractor could be numbered to /10 and the more desirable refractor for me would be blue all day every day. Because of this, I've tried to accumulate at least one Dodgers blue refractor each year for the last seven or eight years. And I've been thrilled with just about all of them. (I somehow missed a 2012 blue refractor, quite possibly because I was so irked by the desi...

In the one day I had off over an eight-day period, I officially designated a binder and paged my 2015 Topps set yesterday. This was the first time that I had performed the ritual for a current flagship set since 2010. And, I'm telling you, I missed it. There is nothing quite like putting a set into a binder for the first time. I haven't even completed the set yet, but it is so much better adding missing cards into slots in a page than adding them to an ordered stack on my desk. The only downside of this is that once the set is in a binder, I feel obligated to catalog it, and that is so tedious, and I have such a backlog. Current cards in stacks aren't tallied, and I only tally them when they are stored in a box or a binder at the end of the year. But the important thing is the set is paged, with the requisite open spots for cards I have not obtained. And into this scenario arrived a package of entirely 2015 stuff from Marc at Remember The Astrodome. Well-timed,...