I love it when a major project turns out to be easier than I expected

 I may have mentioned recently that I wanted to get my "People in my collection" back to being accurate...this is the guide I use to know who I have in my collection, and inversely who I need. This is essential stuff for somebody who's main goal is to get everyone who ever had a card- in three major sports- documented. 

I had let the project lapse, and I thought I had let it lapse back in 2019, when I was facing major burnout on the hobby.

That turned out not to be true...I actually maintained it as late as April 12th, 2020! I know that was the case because that is the last date listed. Recently, I began to expand it. Instead of just listing the people in my collection, I began to document the day they joined the collection (on October 18th, 2018) and in 2019, I began to add in the card that was the first for them as well. The last date listed was the 12th of last April. I suspect I was too busy with models or something and said "I'll go back to it later" but of course I never did...until this week, when I was pleased to see I didn't have as much work ahead of me as I thought I did. 

Even though most of the later half of 2020 was spent on models, I still brought in a ton of cards last year- 9011, not 9009 as I originally reported. As such there were a lot of new names, and I added a handful of baseball cards from one of the boxes that Shane sent me, which were mostly all new, and I was able to trade for a bunch of WNBA cards, which I previously didn't have access to. 

But most of the people I added were NHL players, which isn't much of a surprise since that's where I spend most of my attention now. 

So, since I last updated the list, I added 

• 1 drag racer
• 2 Other racing
• 3 NBA players
• 4 Non-Sport people
• 7 NASCAR drivers
• 5 football players
• 6 college basketball players (who will hopefully be upgraded to NBA/WNBA at some point)
• 52 WNBA players
• 67 baseball players
• 77 Other sport people
• 173 NHL/Hockey players (30 of which were already added in 2021!)

for a grand total of 397 new people, and brings me to 15,191 different people in my collection. 

I really wish that I hadn't let that trail off, because I'd love to know who the 15000th different person was in my collection. Edit: Actually, I was able to figure it out. I wrote the people into the chart in the exact order I got them, so I was able use Excel to sort them by date. I just had to copy and paste them to a worksheet where they were all together, instead of separated by sport. Super easy! No thinking and no math required. It was Erik Westrum, a minor league hockey player I added to my collection on June 1st! Since I have been so busy with other stuff, I have not gotten his card scanned yet. Now that I know that he was a pretty big milestone I will be pulling his card up in the scanning order. And edit 2: I knew exactly where it was (a rarity when my entire collection is stored in identical boxes) so here it is. 

He did get into 27 NHL games in his career and got two NHL cards but this is the only card I have of him at this time.

Of course, that's assuming I didn't make any mistakes, which is highly possible. I'm dealing with a lot of lines of Excel and I may have made a mistake. If I spelled somebody's name wrong it would also not come up with a search so people may be listed more than once. As much effort as I put into it, I'm still only human. I usually find a few people I missed entering every time I type in a scanning wave. (which I'm getting close to doing again) But since this is believed to be accurate, I'm just going to go with it and consider him #15,000. 

I'm sure whenever I hit 20,000 people that will get a post as well. But I am not even going to guess when that will be. It could be this week if I went through all the baseball cards Shane has sent me right away, but I'm not going to do that right now, don't want to get too overwhelmed. It'll happen at some point, and you'll hear about it then.