that horrible feeling when you realize you've invalidated 10 years of effort.

Well, I feel like an idiot. In the last post, I mentioned that I was debating sorting my non-sports non-people cards so I could figure out how many base, parallels, inserts, etc. I had. I was trying to decide if I would wait until I finished scanning everything, or do it now.

Well, I decided to do it now. What a mistake that was. Oh sure, getting the cards was easy- for the most part- and sorting them into subject took only about an hour or so. It wasn't until after I had sorted them...multiple times over...that I realized my mistake.

If you remember, back in January, I posted about how my Excel files had been made mostly obsolete thanks to the Cardboard History Gallery. I still plan to type my cards into them eventually, but for now I am labeling the boxes that have not been entered differently than the boxes that have. Except the non-sports cards, with I have kept special...in theory to type them in anyway since so many do not have the standard personal album each athlete gets.

But I forgot. I sorted the cards that had been entered with the cards that hadn't been. Multiple times over. And there is no way I can remember which cards were in this wave.

So, in essence, the Excel file that tracks my entire non-sports card collection- with some 6000+ cards entered, everything I've scanned since 2010...has been essentially made useless. When I realized my mistake, around 4 AM Wednesday morning, I thought some rather unprintable things- things I would never actually say. And thought for a while about how I could fix it.

I can fix it, without having to retype anything. Since I only list cards I've scanned, and I keep track of the cards I've scanned on an Excel chart, ever since my remote hard drive died and took scans with it, it was ostensibly to know what I had to rescan if I lost something again. But in this case, I could sort each month, then simply copy and paste it over. (Honestly, I've been debating doing that with everything).

But...I'm not sure I want to. With the Cardboard History Gallery, the Excel files are, as I said, obsolete. I only ever used them to find a scan, but now that I have the Cardboard History Gallery set up to show everything by person, set or team (for sports) I don't really have to go hunting for anything. I can easily navigate to it. I have not actually pulled up the non-sport list that I messed up and searched for anything...ever, that I can recall. Certainly not since at least January 18th, the last time Excel records it being opened.

Do I really need it? I'm not so sure that I do.

For now...I'm going to do nothing. Nothing about that, anyway. I'm much more interested in the stats that sorting the cards have given me. I was not able to find my Star Wars box. I THINK I've found everything else I've scanned in full, but I'm not 100% sure. I had the foresight to write down exactly which boxes I included in the numbers here, and have it right in the file itself, where I can't miss it, so if I find something later, I can check and see if it was included. Because, while it's present in my memory right now- it won't be for long. I want there to be no question as to whether or not something was listed.

So now, finally, let's look at the raw numbers. This is only for cards that aren't of one specific person, that lived on this Earth at one time or another...I keep a separate count for them.

The first thing I notice is, I need more parallels! In an ideal world for me, the numbers of inserts and parallels would be reversed. Of course, non-sports cards have more than 100 years of existence before the parallel concept was created...and I do have a pretty decent tobacco era collection going. The vast majority of my collection is 1977 and newer though. Promos and samples are huge in non-sports. My entire Sample collection for cards of people- 99% athletes- is only 244. This is almost exactly half that number, which is pretty impressive really. And I know there are more in the Star Wars box that I was not able to find!
The Star Wars numbers are pretty skewed- they are actually my largest section of non-sports cards. The box that went missing is a 900 count, and there may be an 800 count as well that's about half full, if I recall correctly. You'd think it'd be automotive considering how much I go on about cars and car stuff, but there has not been a decent car set since 1996. Star Wars gets multiple sets every year, and when I got back into non-sports hard in 2010, that was what I focused on the most. When I do find that box(es), it'll put Star Wars over 2000 cards scanned.

DC and Marvel together is destined to always be the smallest section. They only issued two sets together- 1995's DC vs. Marvel and 1996's Amalgam. Unfortunately for me, they both came out when I was moving away from non-sports and going sports only. So I don't have many of them....40 total is it. They are all scanned, and I believe they are the only subject I can say that about, although the argument could be made for the Fantasy designation as well. Animals and Music are both close to completion but still have more cards to come. Everything else has lots of cards left to scan. With both people and non-people combined, I have only 6985 non-sports scanned in full, and my collection is over 15,000. I have a lot of them ahead of me. Luckily, it's one of my absolute favorite subjects to scan...even if I don't talk about it as much on here as I do hockey or basketball or NASCAR. It's mostly due to lack of access to new cards. Most of what I prefer to collect is now older, since most modern non-sports sets are TV & Movie, which I have comparatively little interest in. Not that it stops me from collecting them...

History and Military- which some people would probably consider the same topic- both have a ton of cards where I scanned the front, poorly, but not the back, meaning they aren't counted. Military, in particular, has a lot in those boxes....full sets of both Topps and Pro Set Desert Storm, more than 500 cards from just two sets alone, for example. I have so much left to scan, and I'm not complaining, because I truly do enjoy it.