Night Owl Cards

I used to take Thanksgiving week off from work. This was my ritual for years, an entire two full decades practically. I'm no longer comfortable doing that. Within the last few years, there have been two developments in my job that have made vacations at this time of the year almost impossible. 1. Basketball season starts earlier 2. Football season ends later Come on, high school sports, rein it in. I now spend the Thanksgiving period working on the special high school basketball preview section. Out of all of the seasonal sports preview sections we produce, the basketball one is always the most rushed and hectic, thanks to the aforementioned Thanksgiving holiday and high school football's refusal to let go. The rest of my week will be occupied by the very demanding football. Our area high school football teams continue to perform better and better in state play. Once, and for many years, high school football season ended in my area around the first weekend o...

I am trying the plow through that worst work week of all work weeks: the week after a vacation week. That week, always trying, was exacerbated by a compacted and very busy high school sports schedule. As usual I feel like I'm being punished for daring to enjoy a few days off on my own, like someone assessed a week's worth of penalties for the crime of having off-time. I'm now serving my sentence in the box. So I've been struggling to get to my hobby all week with spotty success. You are allowed only a certain amount of cards in the sin bin. I pulled together two different card packages sent fairly recently that each contained some of the same cards. Here are the cards from Starting Nine : Here are the cards from The Collective Mind : You can see I have two to spare. These are the tarot card-themed inserts from Gypsy Queen this year. A lot of people love these. I'm not into them. They go with the circus-freak vibe of GQ the last couple of yea...

A long time ago, I overheard my wife try to explain my hobby to my daughter, who was much younger at the time. "I think it relaxes him," she said to my obviously perplexed child. I had never thought of it in those terms prior to then, but now it's fairly obvious to me: collecting cards is a way of relaxing. I don't plop in front of the television after a night of work, I write about cards, sort cards, stare longingly at cards. And I feel the stress quietly slip away. It is a terrific stress-reducer. Last night I endured annually one of the most stressful work nights of my job. This won't compute for anyone who hasn't experienced my job responsibilities, but the college football national championship is the one sports event that causes me the most stress. The major cause of this is the starting time for the game. A start time of 8:15 p.m. eastern standard time is terribly inconvenient for an east coast newspaper sports section. For a sport that ends ...

I'll let you in on how it's been going the last couple of weeks around here: (*Work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*eat dinner*) (*work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*greet neglected dog*) (*blog*) (*look at neglected card packages on desk*) (*sleep*) (*work out*) (*work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*greet neglected family*) (*eat dinner*) (*work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*blog*) (*sleep*) (*check bank account*) (*decide I can mail some card packages*) (*work out*) (*scramble to get to post office in 5 minutes I have*) (*work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*eat dinner*) (*work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*great neglected dog*) (*blog*) (*sleep*) (*YAY! DAY OFF!*) (*work, work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*work out*) (*work, work, work, work, work, work, work*) (*greet neglected fam ...*) (*WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK*) (*day off again!*) (*WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK, WORK*) You get the...