NASCAR is completely typed!

 My typing project is progressing well. I have now entered the dates for every NASCAR card I know, making NASCAR the first subject to be completely typed. 

While it was good to get the info fully digital, it wasn't really fun...which I knew going in it would be not so fun. I found it was actually more fun the further I got in to the project, and when I got to the time period when I had dates for almost everything, it was much more enjoyable. 

What I wasn't expecting is that entering the information actually made me really sad and depressed for a few days. Especially the die cast cards. As you may know from previous posts, the Racing Champions stuff is the backbone of my collection. I remember some of the days involved with certain cars & cards very well, and even the memories that aren't tied to a specific place, it all hit me as I was entering that info and just got me down. 

The memories of going to places like Toys R Us, Kay Bee, Kmart, Ames, Jamesway and a couple local places, all places that are long closed...and the fact that Racing Champions was killed solely because of NASCAR being greedy...it just hit me so hard, harder than I expected. (well, I didn't expect that at all, but...). My brother and I used to check TRU and Kmart every Wednesday after the comic store, Wednesday is when the new comics come out. It was a HUGE part of my life, some really great memories, and something I miss. None of the stores are still there, and what I wouldn't give to be able to go back to those times. 

I also realized that my interest in NASCAR waned after Racing Champions was killed. It's not a coincidence. Even though it's still the most important thing to me, and I won't skip a race- not even for, say, a Stanley Cup Finals game- it all changed for me then. It's also around the time we stopped going on our weekly runs. The drop off in the number of cards I got post 2005 is VERY noticeable. 

I did discover that I had 357 MORE NASCAR cards than I thought I did! And that's just what I have documentation on. There's actually a pretty high likelihood there's more that I don't remember having and lost before I created my paper listing. (Which, for NASCAR, I did from 2003-07)

I also discovered that I lost the paper listing for 2013 Total Memorabilia. You may recall I bought a case of blasters from Blowout, and I must have taken the paper listing out when I was doing them in late 2016. I never put it back in my binder! Luckily, I was documenting everything on Excel by that point, so I didn't lose anything date wise, and I even wrote a blog series about it. 

I really wish I had been better about keeping track of the dates I got my cards. I started keeping track on the NBA side in 1998, but let it lapse quite a bit so it's not a full record. I didn't start tracking the dates for NASCAR until Christmas Day 2003 (I labeled the listing at that time) and I didn't create a paper listing for Non-Sports until 2010! At least I had enough sense to track my hockey collection in full and properly. 

Something that worries me is that I have records of getting some cards that I don't have any memory of having, and I don't have scans of from when I scanned all the fronts only, but poorly, for my NASCAR collection in 2009-10. I wouldn't have listed them if I didn't have them in hand at one point, but I don't know where they could have gone. 

I do know I missed at least one box when I was typing in the physical cards, because I remembered a large gift from a friend taking two boxes and I only found one...luckily they were on the paper listing so I was able to figure out how many cards were in that box, about 350. I can tell there was some hockey in there as well, because I've started typing them and I've already found some in my records of getting them that weren't typed in. I recall that box being larger, likely an 800 or 900 count box, so there's probably more I will find as I go through but I've only gotten up to 1990-91 to date. 

It took me about 2 weeks to type in all the NASCAR stuff. I don't know how long it will take me to type in everything else, but I've taken a break to work on models for the last three days and I plan to do some more of that again for the next few days, 

I know this post is not going to be very interesting to most people, but I'm doing this series for me, so you can expect some more posts in the series before I finish. If anyone read it all, thanks for reading.