Night Owl Cards

  Since the start of the year I have been trying to focus on two of my "if it happens, it happens" resolutions. Those two things are to read more books and work on improving my sleep. I work a night job. I often don't get done with work until midnight or 1, 2 in the morning. This is tough on sleep because, as you know, you need to unwind after a work shift -- or at least most people do. For day-shifters, that's easy, they unwind in the evening time, lots of hours before bed. But for me, my unwind time is confined to a couple hours late at night. I've often spent it online, wandering the card blogs or watching videos or just reading stuff. But staring at backlit screens before bed isn't good for sleep. So to hit both resolutions at once, an hour before turning in, I shut off my devices and read a book. It's worked pretty well so far (when the cat isn't acting up) and my sleep improved almost instantly. The first book I'm reading (I have a whole shel...

  I received an email yesterday from Bob of the best bubble , informing me that my other Beckett magazine article is out. This one is about my Dodgers fanhood and is in the latest Beckett baseball magazine. I don't have a subscription to that, so I'll have to wait until I have time to find a Barnes & Noble or grocery store that's carrying it. I need the extra time anyway because I haven't even devoted a post yet to my article that is in Beckett Vintage Collector this month. So with two magazine articles out now, and writing almost every day on this blog, and an actual job that involves -- guess what? -- writing, it's obvious that writing is what I do. What I like to do. What I need to do. Who I am, basically. But how did I get here? You'd have to go back to when I was a kid with a flourishing and overwhelming need to read. I read as a child a lot. From Sesame Street books to the Hardy Boys to The Bronx Zoo. By the time I was about 10, just about the only thi...

I don't get a lot of books in the mail during my online trading. That's fine with me. In fact I kind of discourage people from sending me books. That's because I never read them. I want to read them. But I don't. There are several really good books sitting on my bookshelf right now that I want to read. They've been sitting there for one, two, three, five years. Waiting. This would be surprising to anyone who knew me 30 years ago. I read books and magazines just about every day. I couldn't get enough. Book-reading was one of the top five things that I did. I could get through an entire book in one or two days. Now it takes me two years to get through a book. No joke. Two years. This is the product of a busy life plus three blogs. I know nobody wants to read this, but I am looking forward to wrapping up the two set blogs I'm running, just so I will have more time to read books. I've become a "non-reading reader." During the first 2...

I received this book in the mail from Commish Bob at the '59 Topps blog . He thought it would be something I would enjoy. He's right about that. As you may have guessed, I hold the Dodgers teams from 1977-81 on a higher level than any other team from any other era. This was the period when as an 11-year-old boy, I really formed an attachment to a team, which also happened to be one of the best teams in baseball during that five-year span. The memories of the teams from that time are some of the strongest of any baseball memories that I have. And this is the exact time period, some of the exact moments, that are covered in this book by Paul Haddad. Haddad is a TV producer and writer. He's my age, and he grew up a Dodger fan. The book is filled with every memory you can think of from the Dodgers of that period -- the World Series games, Fernandomania,  Rick Monday's home run, the 1980 pennant race and the suckiness of Dave Goltz, everything. And it is all appro...

I go to the post office about once a week. It's a small office in an almost vacant business building that houses everything from a bridal store to an outpatient chemical dependency clinic. I've mentioned before that, except for Christmas time, hardly anyone knows the post office is there. So, at most, there is a line of three, and I'm in and out. It's a familiar routine. I know the two guys that work there. One, Charles,  is an older, pleasant type of few words. He walks with a bit of limp and usually prefers sweat shirts and sweat pants. The other, Dave, is flashier. He wears open Hawaiian shirts and lifts weights. Sometimes the portable radio blares behind him with a strange mix of AC/DC, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears (it's a bit uncomfortable waiting in a longer line when Britney is moaning "Gimme More," let me tell ya). But both are efficient and friendly. I put my envelopes on the counter, and they plop it on the scale, and the amount pops up ...