Night Owl Cards

It looks like I won't have the ability to put together the usual Night Owl Cards end-of-the-year festivities this year. Too much making merry, I guess. That kind of sucks because I do love to tie a bow on the past year. So maybe you'll see it even when we're a few days into 2016. Meanwhile, I thought I'd quickly wrap up one project from 2015, and that's wallet card. Wallet card began at the start of the year over at Baseball Card Breakdown and everyone was enthusiastic about it, including me. But only a few people kept up that enthusiasm, especially after Junior Junkie ran away with the contest portion of wallet card about 15 days into the thing. My enthusiasm started strong then weakened quickly . My mission, unlike those who used wallet card as a travelogue, was to study the wear-and-tear on a card residing 365 days in one's wallet. I didn't even fully succeed there because I changed my wallet card in early March. Let's face it, my heart ...

This is one of my wallet cards. If you look very closely, you can see Mickey Hatcher blinking as his eyes adjust to the daylight. He's been kept in a dark place for a long time. That dark place is my wallet. This card and my other wallet card just sit there as I sit there, with no place to go. When the wallet card game started, I was filled with enthusiasm, but it soon became obvious that I'm not equipped for this game. My wallet card doesn't go anywhere so I can't photograph him in interesting places, because I don't go anywhere. I don't travel for my job anymore and I certainly don't travel for the heck of it because there's no time/money. And when I do go to a restaurant or a movie or the park, I never think to take out wallet card and snap his picture. So what am I doing playing this game? Wallet card hides in deepest darkest corner of the spacious (re: empty) billfold when I page through what Junior Junkie is doing with his Griffey wa...

Note to Night Owl: Introspective posts don't work when everyone is off at a cookout. OK, on with today's rambling. Even though I've been pretty busy with my job this Memorial Day weekend, I have managed to squeeze in some card things here and there. So let's see what I've been up to. (I've addressed most of this on Twitter, so if you've seen it there already, you can go play frisbee, or whatever people are doing outside now). I am in the middle of updating my Dodger binders again. This is something I do maybe three times a year. Some might consider it monotonous, but I like doing it -- a lot. What I don't enjoy doing is discovering in the middle of updating that I've forgotten some key cards, which happens ALL THE TIME. It happens a lot to me because I pull cards for blog posts and then forget I've pulled them. I pulled a bunch for that face percentage post and totally blanked that there were Dodgers cards for that post, and then upda...

I'm changing my wallet card. I'm assuming I am now disqualified from the wallet card competition, but that doesn't matter to me. When I chose my wallet card, I didn't have much of an interest in featuring it in various locations. Not only can I not compete with Mardi Gras or New York City, but everyone around here has been hibernating for three months. Repeated pictures of cards in front of snowbanks gets pretty monotonous. No, my wallet card was being used to conduct an experiment in how badly a card could deteriorate in a 12 month period. And I chose a Chrome card because Chrome prides itself on being immaculate and beautiful, and I wanted to see one that wasn't those things. Well, I found out that the above image is about as ugly as Chrome gets. It wasn't terribly bright of me not to draw the conclusion that all of the cards that are meant to be in a wallet - driver's license, credit cards, insurance cards, etc., are glossy and laminated for a ...

I don't plan to do an update of my Wallet Card every week, as I know I won't have the time to document that frequently, or want to do it every week. I'm sure people don't want to read it every week. But this was the first week for Wallet Card and everything's exciting and new, so let's take a look at the first week of 2010 Topps Chrome Clayton Kershaw's erosion. I must say this was a wild week for Wallet Card. The weather was freakish. Twenty inches of snow on Tuesday night. Temperatures at minus 25 on Wednesday night. More snow on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Wallet Card learned that just because there's snow or you can't see when you're driving, it's not an excuse to stay inside around here. We're strong and hearty people in exotic northern New York, and Wallet Card is going to have be the same way. On the first day of Chrome Kershaw's stay in my wallet, I took him on my regular walk. I try to go for a walk at least 4 or ...

That's my wallet. Fascinating, huh? It's a good thing we're not blogging about wallets. Our audience would be crickets. And speaking of insects, there really are moths floating around the above wallet. You just can't see them because I'm the one who doesn't have any money. The moths are meant for only me. The wallet is here because I am participating in Wallet Card. This is the new game announced at Baseball Card Breakdown in which you select a specific card, carry it around in your wallet for a whole year, take pictures of the card periodically and post them on your blog. I understand there might be prizes, too, but I'm not in it for the prizes. I just want to do some damage to a card with my ass. This is a variation of the experiment conducted last year by Mark of the Mark's Not Gonna Ephemera Anymore blog. Only he put rubber bands around a stack of cards and carried them around in a shirt pocket for a summer. I thought that was a good ...