Night Owl Cards

It really is interesting to see the extreme reactions to starting up professional sports amid the covid outbreak. As usual, I'm somewhere in the middle, constantly shaking my head at one side or the other. The most recent news to freak out over (or at least last I checked) is a number of Marlins testing positive for the coronavirus. As if we didn't know this was going to happen. What are we going to do now? What will the schedule look like? Will we ever play again? Should we play again? Should we have started playing again? Who are the Marlins anyway? Perhaps you've heard, I'm not a fan of speculation, especially in a situation that no one has encountered before. There are far too many "experts" blathering into the air, who know only what their emotions tell them. I'll politely watch from the sidelines and adjust accordingly. The truth is, baseball's restart plan is indeed ambitious, considering there is travel involved. It's also true t...

Just before I started to return to collecting modern cards in 2006, card companies seemed to be going wild with sets that were difficult to define or track or both. Really, this had been a pattern since the mid-1990s but I tend to pin the blame for that period of craziness on Pacific and Pinnacle and other very '90s sets that had burned themselves out by the first couple years of the new century. With just Topps and Donruss, Fleer and Upper Deck remaining, for the most part, I thought maybe things would have relaxed just a little. But they didn't. Sets grew stranger and more confusing. I was reminded of this by a package I received recently from Greg at The Collective Mind . During his multiple-state travels where he went a-gathering for trading cards and is now inundated with them, he found a few bits of weirdness for my collection. The card above doesn't seem all that weird per se. I like it's shininess. It seems straightforward: it says right there on th...

Adult life is all about demands on your time. That's all it is, scrambling from one thing to the next, forgetting important dates or tasks or interests because your brain has run out of room. I've been dealing with it for years and complaining about it on the blog for a long time, too. But I didn't know anything until I reached 2019. Ever since my parents' passings, I've been attempting to catch up. There's still plenty of aftermath to handle, nowadays it's all about finances. I just got a call on a financial matter because I haven't tended to something basically because I've had no time. At the moment of that call, I felt like I was being pulled in 100 different directions. I even feel like I'm being pulled in too many directions with my collection, too. With all of my interests, I find it difficult to focus when I have a little cash. Recently I used a portion of my payment from my latest Beckett Vintage Collector article to hit up COMC...