Night Owl Cards

I hold grudges against drugstores. I grew up during a time when it was pretty much a given that if you ran a drugstore, you were going to offer trading cards in your store for the kiddies. I can't remember walking into a drugstore that did not sell cards for the first 25 years of my life. That isn't the case anymore. And it pisses me off. It annoys me so much that when I'm in a drugstore and I notice that it doesn't sell cards, it goes on the mental list, and I make it a priority to never frequent that drugstore again. Emergencies excluded, of course. There is one drugstore that is prominent where I live that does not offer cards for which I make an exception. It happens to be very close to me and I can't afford to not shop there periodically. But I won't tell you its name because I'm not giving it free publicity because IT DOESN'T SELL CARDS!!! But for all the rest of you drugstores, either you better hope I'm stranded miles from home w...

This is not a post professing my love for an alt-rock chick named "Dusty," although if I ever create a comic book series, the heroine will be named "Dusty Chrome." No, this about my long-delayed discovery of cards at a drug store. Many, many, many months ago, I read about bloggers finding 2009 Topps Chrome for sale at Rite Aid. It made me positively giddy. First, you don't find cards at drug stores very often anymore. Secondly, there  actually is a Rite Aid in my outpost hell. Two of them in fact. However, I've reached the point in my life where my brain resists absorbing new information. It's a fun side effect of turning 40. I've rejected a great many new-fangled items that I have stumbled across in the last couple of years, just because my brain has turned its nose up at them. So months went by and I never even entered either Rite Aid store. Neither of them are conveniently located. One is way on the other side of town. The other has a ...

I pulled a mouse out of my washing machine today. That was a first. I don't know how it got there. I took some clothes out of the wash that I had put there in the morning, spotted something loose at the bottom, thought it was a kid's toy that came out of a pocket, and picked it up. Yeah, with my hands. When I brought it out of the machine into the light, I instantly realized what it was and dropped it back in the machine. I'm not skittish about stuff like that, but that gave me a jolt. The mouse was dead, obviously, but fluffy clean. And I gave the clothes another wash -- the old-fashioned way in the basement sink -- just so I could stop my brain from doing the freakout dance in my skull. So while I'm contemplating whether we have a mouse problem or not, I am contemplating another issue -- why am I so bored with the current card situation? (Nice segue, huh?) Until today, I hadn't bought any 2009 cards for a month. I hit the big box stores to break that streak. I h...

With money the way it is around here, I can't think of a better buy than this year's Upper Deck First Edition. Normally, I avoid First Edition (and in past years, Opening Day). But at 99 cents per pack, I literally can't afford to ignore these cards. I already find myself buying more packs than blasters this year. I guess if I did the simple math, I'd find out that is not the economical way to go. Blasters save you money if you're the set-collecting type. But I've never been all that thrifty, so I buy a pack here and a pack there and tell myself I'm saving money. At least at 99 cents a pack, I really am saving some cash (unless First Edition blasters are going for $7 a box. Are they?). So tonight I bought my first two First Edition packs of 2009. You'll probably see a few more of these on future Fridays. I'm calling them First Edition Fridays. A little bit of fiscally responsible fun to kick off the weekend. Almost everyone has seen this year's ...