Night Owl Cards

Over the weekend, I got a chance to express my inner Mike Oz and share some baseball cards with a former major league player. I'm working on a story for my paper that involves ex-player Johnny Wockenfuss, who is almost a cult figure with fans of a certain age (I am one) and especially fans of the Detroit Tigers during the '70s and '80s. I won't go into much detail -- at least not now -- because I'm still in the middle of working on it, have more gathering to go, and I get very protective of my stories while I'm in the middle of the process. Got to retain that exclusive, you know. But I will say that I was able to sit in the home of Wockenfuss, give him the cards that I have of him in my collection, and ask his opinion on them. Yeah, cool. Way cool. I have 17 cards of Wockenfuss ("you have a lot of them," my wife said, and I thought "if that's a lot, what is my Hideo Nomo collection?"). Wockenfuss remembered the cards -- ...

Last month, amid all of the work tasks performed in those 30 days, I found myself driving about 70 miles to talk to someone for a part-time job opening. Why I had to drive that far for a part-time job candidate doesn't matter -- well, it does matter but if I think about it too much, I'll get upset. What matters is this person decided right during my talk with him that he had no interest in the job. So, that was fun, 140 miles total for no damn reason. Later in the month, I drove about the same number of miles for another work function, an annual dinner, the organization of which I'm sure takes months, if not years, off my life. But now the payoff. I received a gas reimbursement check a couple of weeks later for 80 bucks. Oh, boy, cards here I come. I usually don't reserve my gas reimbursement for cards. I don't travel all that much for my job anymore, so there's no need to create that kind of budget (when I did travel a lot for my job, I wasn't ...