Night Owl Cards

  I come from a generation that made a big deal about thank you letters. I get why they did, but I didn't like writing them. Every year after Christmas, my mom got on me and my brother to write thank you's to grandmothers or aunts or whoever for sending whatever. I think sometimes I pulled out some paper and pen and scrawled a few lines, but I don't remember doing it that often so it's possible I just plain skipped it most of the time. Ever since then I've been a bit hesitant with thank you's. I'm all right saying it in person -- you have to do it a lot and I think it's a little easier to say it than to write it, at least for me. That seems odd, since I am a writer. I have a lot to be thankful for, of course, and in the hobby, especially. I don't have a high-paying job or grew up in a well-to-do family and never actively pursued a lucrative career. So it's amazing to me that I have the collection that I do. I owe a lot of it to you. So here's...

This is my address book with the addresses of people who have traded cards with me through the mail. I bought it maybe three months into my blogging career when I realized that you didn't just blog about cards but you actually blogged about cards that people sent you, too. It's definitely an old-school way to file addresses. But then this is an old-school hobby and I'm still a guy who thinks if I put critical information on the computer without a physical backup, I'm going to lose everything. I never got around to getting the addresses on some sort of word document so the address book has all kinds of updates and cross-outs and ... well, it's a disaster, basically. You people move, a LOT. However, I consider this book a tribute, a tribute to everyone who has ever sent me cards. And although not everyone in this book has a blog (or had a blog), it is also a tribute to blogging and trading through the blogs. Lately I've seen people gravitate toward Trad...

Yesterday demonstrated perhaps the most concrete example of how little time I have to blog. If you were paying attention, for about three hours last night, I featured, for the first time, an incomplete post on Night Owl Cards. The post ended with about only 40 percent of it complete. Thank goodness it didn't end in mid-sentence, but if you were reading to the end, you probably knew something wasn't right. I had actually finished writing the entire post. But in the process of writing, my daughter signed me out of Blogger in order to do a school assignment and didn't alert me. While trying to edit and save the story, eat dinner, and get it all done before I returned to work, I didn't notice that the version I published was only the part that was written before I was logged out. And, so, because I was at work and way too busy to check the blog, a half-written post appeared and remained there until I could remove it. That looked bad because I was attempting to than...