Night Owl Cards

  It was a very uneventful and quiet Christmas this year. Not a lot to boast about as far as gifts go.   Unlike last year and the last few years, my sister-in-law did not get me any cards. I'm assuming she couldn't find any under the current Fanatics landscape because she always tries her best to get some for me. She did get me a Target gift card but there's nothing online to buy right now as far as 2025 product unless I want to pony up for a hobby box. (I won't bother checking the store in town).   I've yet to receive all my gifts so perhaps there's something card-like in the near future. But I won't pout about it because right before the holiday hit, I received a couple Christmas wishes that came with cards from both The Best Bubble and Too Many Verlanders .   They get it and it sure is appreciated. I'll show off the cards from The Best Bubble first.     Right before snapping pictures of these cards for this post, the Best Bubble cards slipped out of ...

   The hits keep on coming. Still crazy busy here, as soon as something is resolved, more shows up -- "Hello! Deal with me!!"   I'm not going to get into it all. I do that too much and, well, there's not enough time to bore people. So, hey, here are some relatively recently arrived cards that I'll bang out in hopefully a few minutes!!   Dennis at Too Many Verlanders graced me with a surprise envelope a couple weeks (or more?) ago. Much appreciated. So much that among the chaos I frantically looked for some cards to set aside for him once things blew over. I came up with one card. It's been staring at me for days. Obviously not the time for that. But it's a nice card!     I'll start with the best card from what I needed. It's a 1998 Leaf Fractal Materials something-or-other that I'm still trying to decipher, obviously a riff on his 1993 Leaf rookies card. The card looks shinier in person, sorry for the dull picture. And it's numbered to 3,2...

  Although I track milestones on this blog because it's a great way to see where I've been and where I am in the hobby, I don't think about my accomplishments in life very often. As a writer, though, I naturally look inward, so it's not difficult to come up with some on the spot. Some of my biggest are: establishing a career goal in college and making it work for me for 30-plus years, creating a family and raising a smart, well-adjusted go-getter kid, being a home-owner for close to 30 years, winning awards for my writing in my job and reaching a goal I had as a teenager -- writing in a national magazine. And here's another one: completing multiple sports card sets. Ha, ha, you say, that doesn't seem to fit with the ones above. But I say it does, very well. I am almost as proud -- really and truly -- of many of my finished sets as I am of the things above. This set-building ain't easy. I've heard more than one collector say that set-builders are a differ...

  An immediately apparent observation since starting my chase of the late '80s/early '90s Pacific Legends and Swell Greats sets is how available they are. I shouldn't have been surprised -- they came from the late '80s/early '90s -- but as someone who collected fairly frequently at that time, I never saw these cards for sale. Pacific Legends cards were issued mostly as part of "Collectors boxed sets," which were popular at the time. I'm guessing a little bit here as I was a little too old for that stuff at the time (or believed I was). Swell cards, I don't know how they were issued. I started coming across these cards in my early blogging days, from blogger swaps and through repack boxes. The sets are delightful, especially the Swell cards, mostly due to the set checklist, which runs the gamut. You could pull a Honus Wagner, you could pull an Eric Soderholm. Anyway, these cards have been traveling a constant flow to my home from everywhere. TCDB tr...

  After an initial rush of trades on TCDB, what were my first dozen-or-so deals on the site, the offers dried up for several weeks. I could have jumped-started some trades myself by making some offers finally, but I find that part very time-consuming and I've got limited time already. That's why I'll never whine about no TCDB trades because I know it's a two-way street. But I don't have to deal with that particular issue right now because it's like someone flipped a switch, all of a sudden the offers are pouring in again. This time several of the offers were from people I've dealt with a long time through the blogs, either they have their own blog or they've been a frequent commenter. As often is the case with my blog buddies, these trades are much less formal, even on TCDB, and we side-stepped some of the rules that are in place for when I transact with people on that site that I only know as a collection of letters and numbers. But before I get to thos...