Dear Diary Part 2

      I've done a little thinking about my collection a lot lately.  I do need to downsize what I have.  I've decided to sell off all of my complete sets.  Topps 1981-present, Upper Deck 1989-2009, Bowman 1989-present, Allen & Ginter 2006-present along with a few other random sets I have.  They take up a lot of space (nearly 100 complete sets ) and I just don't look at them once they are complete.  I can't tell you the last time I pulled my 1988 Topps set off the shelf and cracked open the box and looked at the cards.  I can probably say that it hasn't been opened since it was completed!
    I've never understood why complete sets of baseball cards are "worth" less that what they are if you added up all the individual card "values".  For example: if you look on ebay for a Super Mario Brothers 3 game for NES you'll find a ton for sale.  Then you find that one copy that has the original box, manual, advertising inserts and maybe the original shrink wrap intact is going to sell for a premium price.  Why the premium price?  Because it's complete!  Why don't baseball card sets carry that premium? Somebody please explain this to me!
 
      I've already had a trade bait blow out which was overall a big success.  I cleared out some room in my tradebait boxes and more importantly  I acquired some really nice cards in return. But, I still have a nice sized pile to send to COMC.  That's ok by me because whatever I sell there, I can turn around and use the store credit to fund my habit to buy some cards I need.  I think I may do a massive last chance clearance before I seal the box and send it out just to see if there are anymore cards that people are interested in.

    I've also purged a bunch of cards from my overproduction era commons boxes.  I'm sitting on a mountain of 3200 count boxes of cards that just take up space.  I don't think I need 800 or so piles of 1988 Topps or 1991 Donruss sitting around in boxes.  I think the Children's Hospital or Goodwill might be a good place to take these cards unless somebody wants them on here.  They would only have to pay shipping or come pick them up.

So looking forward I won't be building sets anymore. I also think this will cut down on the amount of wax I open too.  This won't be a bad thing though.  I'll be able to buy more of the cards I need for my collections instead of cards to just "fill" sets.  I will still open packs and the occasional hobby box but nowhere near what I used to bust.  Hopefully this strategy will keep me from acquiring too much extra cardboard that I don't need.

Dear Diary Part 1

     Sometimes I feel like my blog is the worst on the internet.  All I do is post up trades that I complete, a pack break every now and then with a group break sprinkled in for good measure.  I have a hard time coming up with "original" material like Night Owl, Nick from Dime Boxes, or Napkin Doon do on a nightly basis.  I've never been a talented writer when it comes to originality but when I get a prompt (or in this case a trade) I can usually put together a few paragraphs and say thanks at the end.
     I don't get a ton of comments (669 comments on 437 post, ~1.5 comments per post) but I understand why I don't.  Most everything I post  is "show and tell", so all of the readers just look and move on.
Baseball cards are enjoyable for me and I do it on my spare time (which is less and less these days).  I work a full 8 hours and then I come home to do some work in the yard (more on that a little bit later) or household chores and by the time I sit down to look at cards, my brain is in shut down mode.  Coming up with thought provoking commentary or witty banter about something I enjoy is sometimes tough when you're pooped from the day's activities.

    I'm not trying to sound like a whiner or get some pity from anybody.  I know everybody else has issues that they deal with on a daily basis too.  Bottom line is I hope that my writing style isn't boring to read. My blog is what it is and I just want to thank everybody that does read.  I'm not going anywhere for a while so you're going to have to cope with my blog for long time to come!

The boring stuff starts right here:

     Let me jump back in time to last May when the wife and I moved into a new (to us) house.  I've always been  the kind of person who enjoys a well landscaped yard and we both saw the potential that the house has (and is slowly reaching).  The only thing is that while the inside of the house was well taken care of, the yard had become an overgrown jungle since it was built back in 2007.  Trees were out of control and the flowerbeds were almost non-existent. When the weather cooled last September (right after my adult baseball season ended) we went to work.  I hate Sweet Gum trees, especially those damn spiky "gumballs" that they drop.  Out of the roughly 125 trees I've cut down, hauled away the brush to the dump, given away loads of firewood and chopped up the stumps with an ax, probably 100 of them have been Gum trees!  Luckily our county dump gives away free mulch so we've probably spread about 20 or so loads of that in our new flower beds that have been constructed out of nothing but our imaginations and the dirt under our feet.  All of this has taken a remarkable amount of time  and there's still a lot of work that needs to be done.  Everything I've mentioned has been in the front yard!
     I'm planning on cutting down more trees in the back yard and planting some grass so that there's a nice place for the Mrs and I to relax with our dogs.  Then there's the garden that we're planning on putting in the side yard.  That will also include cutting trees down and getting rid of the stumps!
     I actually enjoy spending the time doing yard projects.  I'm getting my exercise and fresh air and I'm told that's good for me.  Chopping my toes off with an ax or having a tree fall on me would be bad.  I'm looking forward to continually work on finishing up these projects but it just takes time.  One bite of the elephant at a time is what I keep telling myself.