Night Owl Cards

  I enjoyed seeing the Dodgers go 2-for-2 over in Japan the last couple of days. Not that I was able to see it live. Anything happening between 5-8 in the morning is guaranteed to be slept through by this night owl. I think I've seen maybe 20 sunrises in my entire life, and a few of those were because I stayed up all night.   So, I caught a partial rewatch each day, where I had time. Beyond admiring Roki Sasaki, Tommy Edman, Will Smith, etc., I was impressed with the relative ease the whole experience was for the Dodgers and Cubs. This is international travel with all kinds of preparations and issues.   Heck, I can't even get a simple envelope of cards across an international border that's 30 miles from me.   A couple of months ago I went to send a package to Sportscards From the Dollar Store as I have done many times before. It's shipping to Canada, which is a little more, but I don't mind. But this time, when I gave my package to the post office employee she told...

  Even though everywhere I have lived it snows, I am caught unaware every year when the weather first gets cold and flakes start falling. Yesterday as I was driving to and from work in the evening, the temperature was around 18 degrees, the coldest it's been since last winter, and the dumb ski vest thing I was wearing (I never could get the handle of those) was not protecting me. Then it snowed the last couple of days, nothing more than an inch or two but the first snow of the year, and I was not prepared. I could not handle the thought of scraping a windshield and I sat in the car waiting to be spirited away. I'll get used to this in a day or two, hell, at this time last year we already had a monster storm a week before Thanksgiving. This ain't nothing. And it's enough snow to make things festive. It also is an appropriate backdrop for the latest send from Sportscards from the Dollar Store . Douglas always seems to send his cards during the winter season, or maybe I...

  Everyone seems to love Buffalo these days, at least from a football perspective (unless you're a weird Jets, Dolphins or Patriots fan). I'm not used to it, most long-time Bills fans aren't. Just about all of my life, the Bills have been ridiculed for either being lousy, losing four straight Super Bowls or just playing in a location that gets a crazy amount of snow. "None of those people ever lived in Buffalo," I'd tell myself.   But now that doesn't matter, even people who never set foot in that city are riveted by Josh Allen and the Bills and celebrating the team. Even if I don't get some aspects of the current fan base -- the "Bills mafia" was never a thing back in the '80s and '90s and -- I smile inside when my city, the one I wish I could live in again, is praised. It's all over all the social medias, and it feels good to root for a team so loved, to be in this very odd era of good feeling, after having to explain myself for...

    Those of you who know what this sign means know both where I was the last couple of days and what quality food is.   John & Mary's has been a sub sandwich institution in Buffalo for 70 years, the first restaurant was opened exactly 70 years ago at the site of this very picture that I took on Harlem Road in the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga. My folks used to talk fondly about John & Mary's when I was a kid and every once in a while on our trips to Buffalo, we'd stop for lunch at one of the locations, usually outside the city. When I started going to college in Buffalo, John & Mary's was one of the only places that I knew that was neither fast food nor dorm food. So I'd go to the Sheridan Drive location quite a bit. A year or two later, I met a girl. Wouldn't you know, she knew about John & Mary's. Even better, her home was mere blocks from the original J & M's! Jackpot! I can't tell you how many take-out dinners came from the p...

  It's time for a football post since that's all I've been hearing about lately. I'm sure that'll cause some baseball diehards to ignore this, but I don't think baseball is doing itself any favors right now, so I'll focus on a sport that's actually operating. I was talking football to a co-worker and the topic of Bills quarterbacks came up. I'm pretty hazy on NFL history, even for my favorite team, and he was trying to remember the names of the Bills QBs between Joe Ferguson's retirement and Jim Kelly's arrival. He started talking about Joe Dufek, who I don't remember at all, and then he was trying to remember the other barely-there Buffalo QB from that time. "Vince Ferragamo?" I offered. No, it wasn't Vince, he said. He never did figure it out. I did later. My football cards told me. Cards are good like that. It was Bruce Mathison. He started seven games during the Bills' horrific 2-14 season in 1985. Ferragamo started ...