Night Owl Cards

Have you ever wished that you could budget the events that happen in certain months like you do an insurance or electric bill? I certainly do. The first two months I would attack would be March and October. Why must those two months continually hurl time-consuming, energy-sapping activities/tasks at you so that you have no idea what date it is, what day, sometimes even what hour? High school playoff games, on top of the baseball postseason, on top of the NFL, on top of work upheaval and restructuring, on top of seasonal change activities, on top of emergency home repairs. Spread it out a little! Usually my down time includes hobby activity or low-key game viewing or random household activities. But in October, if you have a team in the postseason, virtually all of one's downtime is spent pacing in front of the TV. The last two innings of last night's Dodgers-Nationals NLDS-deciding game, I barely sat down. You know that feeling you get when you're in that room wa...

I received a few Nebulous 9 needs from Brian of cardnomics recently. They are much appreciated and I can't wait to add some more cards to that list. This Ivan DeJesus diamond sparkle card from a couple of years ago brought me down to one Dodger card left to complete that parallel set. But as I pulled this card from the package, it occurred to me how "old news" diamond parallels are. Since the time in 2011 when these things were all the rage and collectors vowed to complete an entire set of them, new parallels have replaced them. First there were cognac parallels, also known as liquorfractors, that arrived a few months after the diamond parallels. Then came the gold sparkle cards -- I still don't know the formal name of those -- in 2012 Topps. Those were replaced by the emerald parallels -- what I like to call the "rain forest" parallels -- of 2013 Topps. Each time collectors oohed and aahed about the new parallel and the previous one was alm...

I was pondering what to write about tonight when I decided to address something that's been rattling around in my head for weeks. I do a lot of self-evaluating in life. I am constantly re-examining decisions, plotting courses, setting up plans of action, and, yes, second-guessing myself. This is a personality trait that, for the most part, has served me well in life. Thanks to it, I've had a lot of stability in my life and I don't experience the upheaval that I see with endless people around me -- a lot of people who don't take a moment to observe what they're doing. I also do a lot of evaluating outside of myself. I observe what's going on in life. I observe others. It's interesting to me how people can always land on one side of a topic and never another. Pick a topic and they're always on the right or the left, pro or con, fan boy or troll. I'm not like that. I can usually see and understand both sides of an argument on almost any topic. ...