pretty big hockey milestone

 Although I have not had much motivation to write, I am still doing card stuff almost every day. And that stuff is mostly in the form of scanning, which as I've well documented in previous posts is one of my favorite things to do. 

Today I hit a pretty big milestone in scanning, as I've scanned my 20,000th NHL Card! 

It turned out to be this Mikael Backlund card from 2020-21 Parkhurst. 

Ever since I began collecting the NHL, which is just a month short of 8 years already, I've been storing all the NHL scans in one folder. I assumed I would have to break them up into year folders like I did for the NBA and NASCAR, but that happened on my old computer, which maxxed out at 16000 items per folder. My current computer obviously doesn't have that limitation, since after adding the November scanned cards I was at 19726 scans in the folder. I knew it was likely going to see me hit the 20000 mark during December, but then I did a big batch of NBA and Non-Sports cards after a big batch of hockey. After the last batch I was 17 scans away but I have found that planning scanning isn't as fun as random scanning so I wasn't going to force it...then I finished that box and opened up the next box to work on and what do I come across but the entirety of the 2020-21 Parkhurst cards I got in trade on the Database several years ago and hadn't scanned yet. Backlund happened to be the card that was the 20,000th. 

While this is #20000 for the NHL, this isn't #20000 for hockey.   I have 7 cards from international leagues, 450 for minor leagues, and 39 for national team only sets, which means I'm basically at 2/3rds of my entire hockey collection scanned at this point! I have 31thousand something cards in my NHL collection, although that number will probably go up at Christmas since that is my #1 card receiving day of the year, although if not, that's OK too. 

I'm starting to feel like the end is in sight on the scanning project. There's still years ahead of me but the scanned cards now outweigh the waiting to be scanned by a significant margin...I estimate that I have only about 1/4th left to scan or less. Of course I also estimated that I would finish scanning everything in 2016, so my estimating skills are poor at best, LOL. I'm actually a bit worried about what I'm going to do when I finish scanning everything. That's so much of my life now for so long, I don't know what I'll do with my time once I finish. I'll think of something, that's a problem for another day, another year...for now I got back to editing scans.