… has Andy, Jon’s more obnoxious blogging half, been for the past two months or so? Well, let me tell you!
– In October, my mom was diagnosed with congenital heart failure and received an aortic valve replacement surgery. It sounds hilariously trivial in a few words like that, but let me assure you that the 2 weeks leading up the surgery, the 5 hours in the waiting room and the beginnings of the recovery process constitutes the most intensely life-altering month of my nearly 30 years. Her recovery is going swimmingly because she’s a tough old bird, but reading every piece of information about the surgery on the internet caused no lack of sleepless nights during that time period.
– I’ve spent nearly 70 hours a week working on my new company and various other projects meant to keep cashflow at a card-purchasing level. It’s a long process this “building a business” for oneself, so my budget remains shoestring.
– Due to said shoestring budget, I’ve purchased nary a card (save a successful-surgery-celebratory money-shredding, soul-sucking highway Chromery) for myself since placing me and Jon’s pre-order for Topps Chrome and Topps Update. Jon even had to bust Chrome without me because I was in my hometown with my family when it arrived. I may never forgive him.
– I’ve spent approximately 500 hours logging and listing many hundred soon-to-be-former members of my pretigious record collection. If you like awesome punk rock records, you can check them out here. On a collecting-related note, let me just say that, while the Discogs.com mission statement is noble to the highest degree, the site is a brutal pain is the ass to navigate and contribute to. And I thought SportLots was bad! Oh wait… I still do.
– In the quiet time between dinner and when my girlfriend wakes up from her post-dinner lap (frequently on my lap, preventing laptop work), I’ve recently rediscovered a long-forgotten love of video games. If I play them real quiet-like, I get a good 30-40 minutes in before she wakes up and reminds me that there are more important things to be doing. So I actually opened my copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune that I bought LAST Black Friday. And, let me tell you, this game is the game I wanted to play all my childhood life. I’m so excited that they made a 2nd one! As soon as I finish this one I’ll…
Oh. Well… I guess I’ll get to this new one in about 2015. No spoilers, anyone!
– On top of all this, I’m quickly approaching my 30th birthday and have lots of preparation for my 1/3 life crisis to do. So far, it does not include baseball cards but if I know crises (and I think I do!), they’ll find a way in there somehow! In all honesty, I am having a bit of a collecting dilemma. I’ve become less a collector as time goes by and my apartment grows smaller. 5 years ago, selling my 1st press of Minor Threat’s first single was unthinkable. But I hardly batted an eye when I packed it up and sent it to a nice guy in New Jersey. I love opening wax, but keeping the cards inside rarely interests me anymore. I don’t have any way to display any of my collection, so even my Royals On-Card Auto collection goes unappreciated in a closet. What’s a collector to do when “collecting” loses its magic? We’ll see how this plays out… perhaps our incoming case of Holiday Special Indiana Jones Heritage will rekindle my love for non-sport with its sketch cards and hilariously low-end autos. The new Star Wars Galaxy is tickling my fancy as well.
So I’ll have to get a little creative with my posts. Maybe focus more on cards I already have or cards cheap enough for me to have like my man Night Owl manages to do so well. Maybe focus a little harder on the small collections I have going in an engaging way like our boy Wrigley Wax does. Perhaps I’ll dust off my late 70s/early 80s near-sets and try to coerce some folks into trading to complete them. Surely, that will yield some interesting trade posts (such as those posted by our favorite trade poster Nachos Grande)! Only time will tell what kind of collector/blogger I will become in the new year. And, speaking of the future, I’ll leave you with a surefire winner of my personal 2032 Game of the Year…
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