Night Owl Cards

The spending moratorium has ended. Cash is flowing again. It's been a while since I had an August like that. It used to be a regular thing -- every August I knew money would be tight -- but the last few years we had somehow avoided it. Then, thanks mostly to pandemic-related bureaucracy, cash-strapped August made its triumphant return. But enough of that! Trading is back. Online card purchasing is resuming. And, most importantly, I've found monies for approaching card shows and post-office trips!   I'll be gathering together a couple of envelopes for sends this weekend. Meanwhile I have received a series of PWEs. Even with my professional writing talents, I have a difficult time devoting one post toward a PWE. So you're going to see a parade of them. Don't worry, it's a short parade, not one of those with 46 school bands, each one stopping in their tracks to play the The Muppet Show Theme.   I'll even put them in pyramid form for you.   First the latest Time...

One thing that I fail to do when trading in this hobby is make the best use of my PWEs and my extra pages. When sending out a PWE, I usually pack maybe 3 or 4 cards into penny sleeves and fold some paper around it so the cards don't move around and then ship it off. Meanwhile, people are stuffing up to 12 cards into one-third of a nine-pocket page and shipping it in that same PWE. What's wrong with me? I don't know, I guess I don't have a lot of extra pages around right now. But that's not the main reason. The main reason is I don't think of it. And when someone sends me one of those cut-up pages, I don't keep them so I can be just as efficient when I send out PWEs. Yup, those cut-up pages just get chucked. I'm the place where pages go to die. I've got to stop that. I have a card room and a card desk and a card drawers full of supplies. I love my card drawer full of supplies. All I need to do is add those cut-up pages to the drawers an...

Even though the PWE has become much more prevalent in card exchanges through the mail -- who can afford postage prices anymore -- I still see a bit of attitude about it from time to time. Mostly this is in reference to ebay sellers and their lame packaging. Those complainers have a point sometimes. But other times I look at it and think, "it's a plain, white envelope. That's perfectly legitimate for one card." PWE's can pack a surprising punch. Also, there's something meaningful about a PWE that other packaging doesn't possess: "Here's something that I found just for you -- one card -- and I just had to send it." I received three such PWE's recently. One of them contained the card above. It came from R.C. , who got in on Topps' online 3-D promotion before the cards sold out. The 3-D effect is almost impossible to show on a scan, and I don't do gifs, but, trust me, it's quite effective. It has an updated Sportflics...

First things first. I ran into Tommy John today. I was minding my own business, racing out to mail off some card packages before the post office closed. It's a small office. The space behind the counter is probably 10 feet-by-40 feet. There were a lot of people waiting, a collection of them off to the side and I didn't know if they were really in line or not. So I was in a state already. An older couple was at the front of the line talking to the post office worker. The man, tall with graying hair, was very animated, cracking jokes. Almost non-stop. When I walked in, he was talking about the dance "The Hustle" for some odd reason. And then he'd riff onto a totally different reference. And then another one. Then he turned to face the woman he was with, and I knew instantly: "That's Tommy John!" Suddenly I became uncomfortable. I wanted to be 11 again and run up to him and tell him that he was the first person I ever saw on a baseball card and...

Yesterday I was resigned to never knowing the joy of viewing a 1955 Golden Press Stamp Book Tommy Lasorda in person. Steve from The Card Chop had planned to send it to me without my knowledge and happily shipped the package on its way from beautiful western Idaho. Then, tragedy. Steve displayed on Twitter yesterday what had arrived in his mailbox . Ugh. A postal body bag. We Care. Our Regrets. Damaged in Handling. All in one incriminating package. Steve politely informed me of what was in the package and we discussed what had become of Golden Stamp Tommy since we knew he never completed his journey to the Northeast as intended. Possibly, Tommy was chewed up by some fiendish sorting machine. Possibly some collecting postal handler had nabbed Tommy for his own collection. When you send out PWEs, these are the potential consequences. I bid farewell to Tommy. The stamp-card I never knew. A day later, I went to the mailbox and pulled something strange out of it. It was...