Surprise cards from Jon, a BIG upgrade, a balancing act and baseball and football too

Lots to cover today! I have not written much lately, and still have the promised posts finishing my COMC Christmas waiting to be written. But first:

I received an unexpected package from Jon of A Penny Sleeve for your Thoughts, thank you Jon! I have not gone through every card yet- some will appear in the Card of the Day project. What I have gone through so far is great! I really have a deficiency of eTopps cards, this is only my third.

The box up above is mostly all 2014-15 Prizm, a set Jon has been working hard, and I am quite thrilled to be the recipient of his duplicates. He remembered the 1990 Topps baseball set is one I really like the design on and sent me two teambags full. So far I've only gone through the team bag that shows Andrea Bargnani and some of the one that shows Devyn Marble.

On February 4th, my Mom got me a late Christmas present...a new TV! My previous TV, which I had since 2002, died sometime in 2016. I don't know when, but I know it was sometime between May 1st, when I got my smart phone, and November 23rd, when I became a hockey fan. Since then, I have watched everything on my phone...which has been great. I would not have become an NHL fan if that didn't happen. But it has limitations. It's a pretty small screen, and every time there is an Emergency Alert System test, which is usually several times a night, I lose my TV for anywhere between 5 minutes and a half hour. I've missed the ends of games because of it more than once. Also, since I had been using it to watch TV, taking pictures is a bit of a challenge. I would have to wait for a commercial break, rush to get them done, and then hope I got them on the first shot because hockey or basketball was back on. (the camera on the phone is better than my actual camera) One other thing- on my cable company's app, you can't type in the channel numbers you want to watch. You have to scroll through them. The channel numbers for the NHL and NBA are 254-278. I would often miss stuff during the time I was scrolling to the next channel...and sometimes it would lock up and I'd have to do it all again.
The new TV...it's big. 32 inches. That's 20 inches larger than my old TV, and about 27 inches larger than my phone!

In this photo, you can see my phone in front of the TV...and on the right is a standard size card for comparison (one of the ones Jon sent me, in fact). This is nice...I can see stuff again. With my poor eyesight I could barely see the old TV when it was on. Now I can not only see the new TV, I can see detail that I didn't even know was captured by the cameras before....it's like being there.

And that brings me to the balancing act. I watch the NHL every night, and then the NBA games in the next morning because they repeat until around 3 PM every day. it's a system that usually works, and allows me to see almost every NBA game played in a night. It doesn't always work, due to my schedule, which is constantly being changed by my health, something that is VERY frustrating and unpleasant, but I can't do anything about that. For the next two weeks, give or take, it's going to be crazy- the Olympics started late last night, and I LOVE the Olympics, as you all know if you've been reading for a while. That's going to complicate things. But wait, there's more! This Saturday, less than 48 hours away...the 2018 NASCAR season starts! I am not into NASCAR as much as I once was. Too many stupid rules changes just for the sake of making rules changes is the biggest part of it, but it always starts at the Daytona 500, one of  my favorite races of the year...and one that usually holds my full attention. All four will be going on at one time for the next few weeks.
I won't miss Daytona. it will always get the nod over any other sporting event or TV show- last time I even missed the Olympic closing ceremony because it went up against the 500. I suspect the NHL and NBA will be getting the short shrift for the next couple of weeks- the Olympics only come every 4 years (the winter ones, anyway) while I enjoy the others for several months every year. But I will be sure to try and watch as much as I can during that time as well.

I suspect, at some points, I will be watching the TV with one sport and my phone with another, at the same time. I tried it last night already, with the TV on NHL Network and the phone showing Olympic curling, but I fell asleep quickly, and at some point the Olympics were lost due to yet another EAS System notification. (When that comes up, the TV does not automatically come back, I have to manually get out and go back in- not possible when asleep). While I know I can't give both my full attention, I should be able to see if something important is going on, or at least glance over and check the scores from time to time.

While I have not been writing blog posts about cards, I have been doing stuff with my cards. For the past five years, I'd been working on getting my collection scanned and posted to the Trading Card Database, a project I finished in December. Since that is not taking up all of my time anymore, it's allowing me to work on some of my projects of typing my own cards into my various Excel charts. It is not really important to anyone but myself, but it gives me something to do other than sit here and whimper from the pain I'm constantly in.

I recently expanded out my charts to include teams listed with each card, and I also copy and paste the information into charts for each team, which, when finished, will give me a complete listing of how many cards I have for each team- something I've never had, even though I've often wondered. I also C&P to a chart for each season. Having the information stored in four separate places - by person, by team, by year, overall- means that if one file corrupts or is lost I won't lose everything, like I did with my original NBA file. I also keep copies of each file in multiple places, including backed up by both google and amazon, so I should never lose my work ever again. I won't leave my computer without backing up my work, even to just go wash my hands or check the mail. After losing my efforts on multiple occasions I'm a little obsessive now.

I'm only working on cards which I've already scanned, and I'm trying to decide if I want to go through my entire NBA collection to add the teams in, or work on it whenever I feel like and scan more cards otherwise. I have not scanned any cards in the month of February. Not a single one! That's more than a week without scanning, which feels odd and wrong. I don't know yet what I will do.

But, I decided to tackle the "low hanging fruit" and create the charts for baseball and football. That should be pretty easy...I've only scanned, as I found out when I finished copy & pasting everything into the new chart, 196 cards for baseball. I have not finished entering the football cards into the chart yet, but it's about 500 cards. I thought I might be able to finish both in one day but I'm the world's worst time estimator.

I had a couple observations that aren't really enough to get their own topic, so I share them now:

• Baseball fans have it good. You can, with enough money and time, collect a card from every year from 1919-today. That's a 99 year consecutive streak of cards! No other sport comes close. Heck, only the NHL has even been around that long and it was just 2 years old at that point. For NASCAR, you can only collect from 1988-today and the NBA, 1983-84 to today. That's not good for my sports. Good for baseball people. And, other than 1918, you could do 1905-today. And that's not even counting Multi-Sport sets, which were much more prevalent before WWII.
• The concept of collecting one card of every person to get one, which I am doing with my three sports, would be darn near impossible to do with baseball. The Trading Card Database lists that there are 64,392 people with baseball cards. And there may be more who don't have listings yet (still an on-going project). While there are surely a good number of them who never got into an MLB game, that's still a staggering number of people. The NBA and NASCAR segments of that project are around 3000 people and less than 1400 people, respectively. 
• For a sport I don't actively collect, I actually have a pretty good collection. Most of them have come from other collectors, especially Joel Freedman, who in blind trades has gotten me back to the late 1950s in both baseball and football. 
• Football cards are the most frustrating to work with. Many of them do not list a team name, only giving you a logo, or in some instances, not even that. In my project of entering the teams I've had to pull up the Database and check specific cards, and I even had to pull up Wikipedia several times to see the history of the team names. (The Arizona Cardinals date to the 1800s! I didn't know that) The fact that some teams have moved locations and kept the exact same logo has not helped. At least one set didn't even bother to give you the player's first name on the card! If it was not for the Database, I would not have known or even known where to look. It's annoying to have to go elsewhere to try and figure out WHO you have a card of, let alone what team he plays for. There are also more than a few teams that don't have their name printed anywhere on the jersey or uniform- not much help there.

I'm glad to get these in Excel- when my project is done, which will not be soon, I should have a searchable, sortable listing for every card in my collection...and I'll have a full number of what I actually have. I have a number I'm considering official, but I'm sure it's not right. I have a strong suspicion I didn't count oversize cards back in the day, or undersize cards either, for that matter. Short of getting them all out and recounting them, I just don't know. When they are all typed into Excel...it will tell me. Problem solved and I don't have to do any math, the system will do it for me. I just have to do the manual labor of typing it in...type it into one chart then copy and paste the info into several others. It's easy, but time consuming...luckily, it's mostly fun. When I created my NASCAR chart in the same style a week or so ago, I was able to copy and paste more than 29,000 cards in one day. it helps to have the into mostly already typed. Of course, as I realized afterword, doing it that way was not the right way to do it, but it's done now. I will know better when I do the NBA chart. which is about double the size of the cards. I've already manually typed in more than 4000 cards, but I think the new copy and paste method is better, so I'm seriously considering deleting what I've already done and starting over from scratch. (More likely- renaming the file and starting a new one, saving this one just in case) Once it's fully done I'll just have to type in new additions, or at least newly scanned, but it's not like I have anything better to do.

It's going to be YEARS before I'm done/caught up though. And I'm not complaining about that, because working on my cards is one of the only things that makes me anything resembling happy, so the more I get to do with them, the better it is for me. Even when I do catch up, I'm sure I'll find something else to "tinker around" with them, no idea what yet.

Finally...the 2018 Topps baseball set came out recently and most every blog is talking about it. Every single time I see it, it makes me think of the song from Water Slide World, a theme park in Lake George NY, which has run the same song in TV commercials since at least the 1980s. I get this song in my head EVERY SINGLE TIME I read about the new set.

While I've never actually been there- I don't do water parks- I've driven past it thousands upon thousands of times, and summer doesn't seem right if I don't hear this song on a local TV commercial, which, sadly, I don't anymore as we have not gone to Lake George in summer since the year 2000. They only play it there, not here, three hours south.