Night Owl Cards

  I should probably post some thanks here for Nachos Grande running the end of the year awards again this year and allowing me to win Blog o' the Year for a fifth time.   I appreciate it after so many years of doing this because like I've said before, blogging about cards is far from the hot, young thing it once was. Folks still voting for NOC all these years later means I'm still doing what I set out to do -- writing about my love for cards and trying to do it in an interesting way. Glad to still be of service.   OK, now on to getting rid of some cards.   The last downsizing session a month ago was an immediate success, much to my surprise. So I'm going to try again with some slightly -- very slightly -- more interesting cards. As a refresher, I need to get cards out of my house. The card room is sizeable but can no longer hold everything. In order to make room for more cards I have to get rid of cards that aren't useful, i.e., have been stashed in boxes for year...

   I just finished another yearly sort of my Dodgers dupes boxes. It took a long time, as usual.   Thanks to giving away some Dodgers cards recently, I freed up some room. But there are still plenty of extras that will probably be with me for the rest of my days.   I don't want that to be the case with many of my other cards.    I alluded to this during my anniversary post a couple of months ago. I need to downsize. You've seen my card room. It's fairly big. There are two large shelving units that are packed. There are boxes stored on another shelf and in a couple of drawers, and in a closet. I am officially out of room.   I don't want to stop collecting, but to keep going, I need to clear out some space. My plan is to remove some/many of the cards in boxes and then I can take some of the cards that are now in binders and shift them to boxes, freeing up some space on the shelves.   So what happens to the cards I'm taking out of boxes??   Ah y...

  Maybe it's the start of the year, but I feel the urge to leave the social media scene more and more. I don't consider blogging part of that. It's separate for me. But I deleted Twitter/X two months ago and I think Facebook will be coming next. I know a lot of folks deleted Facebook a long time ago, I get it. I've stayed because of connections to people who mean something to me in my life. But as some of them leave the app themselves, there's less there for me to see and the recent news that the site is about to enter an even wilder scene than it already has isn't encouraging me to stay (I have never relied on Facebook for news, I have a journalism degree for crying out loud).   I never joined Instagram or TikTok, so if/when Facebook leaves, all that will be left is Bluesky . (There's also Discord, but I'm not on that much).   For now, Bluesky is pretty delightful. Part of me expects it to go to pot eventually like it seems every social site does, but I...

  Longtime readers might know that I was diagnosed as diabetic almost 12 years ago. It pretty much floored me, but I went to work right away and within three months I was in remission. At the time I was determined to get myself healthy the natural way without medicine, and it worked. I continued to do that through doctor visit after doctor visit. Warding off diabetes without any pills is not easy. I also did not check my sugar regularly, which has received some blank stares from nurses. It's kind of a tightrope act, I need to be super-vigilante about my weight and what I eat, but the theory on that lifestyle choice is, "that's what you should be doing anyway," so why not? Diabetes gets progressively worse as you age, and I've been coping with holding it off for more than 11 years. I'm not young anymore, I'm more than halfway to 100, and I've noticed it getting more difficult. A couple pounds over can make a difference. I'm no longer opposed to medi...

  The card blogging world has taken another hit with even some of the blogging diehards of the last 10 years deciding they're too busy to generate regular content. That's an individual choice, obviously, although it forces me to read the vacant card thoughts of Twitter folks rather than the well-crafted and informative prose that has helped shape my card opinions for the last dozen-plus years.   Not even free cards are keeping those blogging tabs open for those folks. Too bad, more for me, I suppose.   I took advantage of another Time Travel Trade from Matt and this is what I received, simply for reading and unloading a few cards I don't need:   I have no intention of trying to complete the 1976 Topps football set. But it is the first set I saw in which I was aware that "there are football cards, just like there are baseball cards." The first football card I actually saw was the 1975 Topps Alan Page. But at the time I couldn't tell you anything about the card...

I have a lot of Dodgers cards. Many of them I don't need. They're extras. They just sit there and sit there, waiting and waiting. I suppose I could do a frankenset with the dupes or some other such thing, but that would mean finding another binder and devoting time to duplicates. That doesn't sound like fun. I have so many of these extras that I'd love to distribute them. Sometimes I offer up an invitation to Dodger collectors reading the blog that I'll be glad to send out some Dodger cards to them. I just did that in yesterday's post, in fact, about my OPC Dodger doubles. No Dodger collector responded. That happens a lot. I don't really know why. I know that the number of Dodger collectors on the blogs has decreased over the years. Some have stopped blogging. Some are still blogging but have stopped reading -- or at least commenting. The other Dodger collectors, well, I don't know what your excuse is. Explain yourselves! I know who the usu...