Night Owl Cards

This card arrived in the first mailing I ever received from Wes, the nationally renowned card provider for many card-loving bloggers. It's impressive in its own right but merely hinted at what was to come. Bloggers are paying their respects to Wes of Area 40 (and formerly of Jaybarkerfan's Junk) as he's departing from the hobby scene for the most part. I thought I'd offer my thoughts, too. Wes' ability to buy boxes upon boxes upon boxes is impressive but his generosity is even more so and really the lesson for us cardboarders. The first mailing from Wes arrived in January 2012 after Night Owl Cards was declared "blog of the year." Wes used to hold a contest on his old blog allowing people to vote for the card blog of the year. I won four years running, although I think Wes held the contest for only three years. Wes then sent out cards to the winner. The first prize package was impressive enough with the shiny Archives Jackie and a hard-to-reach K...

As I continue to assess what I really enjoy collecting, I find myself in a sort of collecting limbo. I'll go back to my traditional collecting desires, my many Dodgers cards and Dodgers binders, and that feels quite comfortable to me still. And then I'll dive into some of my more recent interests -- the '70s NFL cards and the Sabres cards and the music cards -- and those seem wonderful in a much more unfamiliar but exciting way. I'm a little out of my comfort zone when it's not all baseball, all-Dodger baseball all the time. I'm not nearly the expert that I am in the baseball arena. But that's OK. The hobby is anything I want it to be. I can test the limits of my comfort if I want. And that's exactly what I did recently, although it wasn't my choice at the beginning. But first, let's see some cards that I am completely comfortable with because I have been collecting them for the life of this blog and earlier: These, and the ...