Night Owl Cards

All right, it seems the blog will look its normal self unless I feel like spending 48 hours straight finding a Blogger set-up that will accommodate a graphic element. Seems my only choices for the new Night Owl Cards logo my daughter made are "monstrously huge" or "banish it to the sidebar." So right now it greets you when you go to the sidebar. You all know where the sidebar is right? Just click on those three little horizontal lines in the top right corner and it'll drop down for ya. Meanwhile, I'm determined to make that logo mine and spread its love throughout the blogosphere! Expect to see business cards in your trade envelopes and sporadic appearances of the logo in posts. Expect T-shirts and calendars and gym bags, as I shake my fist at Blogger! Anyway, a few weeks ago a bunch of bloggers discovered an online cards-for-sale site called Baseballcardstore.ca . I guess it's been around for a little bit, offering cards up for 25 cents apiece....

As I continue to assess what I really enjoy collecting, I find myself in a sort of collecting limbo. I'll go back to my traditional collecting desires, my many Dodgers cards and Dodgers binders, and that feels quite comfortable to me still. And then I'll dive into some of my more recent interests -- the '70s NFL cards and the Sabres cards and the music cards -- and those seem wonderful in a much more unfamiliar but exciting way. I'm a little out of my comfort zone when it's not all baseball, all-Dodger baseball all the time. I'm not nearly the expert that I am in the baseball arena. But that's OK. The hobby is anything I want it to be. I can test the limits of my comfort if I want. And that's exactly what I did recently, although it wasn't my choice at the beginning. But first, let's see some cards that I am completely comfortable with because I have been collecting them for the life of this blog and earlier: These, and the ...

When I was in college I took a journalism interviewing class. Taught by a former reporter and editor at The Buffalo News with a sarcastic/sadistic streak, it was the most challenging and probably the most influential class of my entire college career. I likely have never encountered interviews in my professional life as difficult as three separate ones I did in that class. Anyway, one of the students in that class was your stereotypical bleach blonde of the late 1980s. My professor liked sports and so did many of the males in the class. She looked at sports with disgust and went on a brief rant about them one time, but fortunately I can't recall her words. Obviously, as someone who blogs about sports and whose work life and free time is about sports, I didn't agree with her. I still don't. However ... That's not to say I can't enjoy a world without sports. In the past three years or so I've gravitated a little more toward nonsports cards. I've...