Making it up as I go

Is it possible for the internet to be overcrowded?

I don't know if it is actually possible or not, but it sure feels like it as of late.

From what I've been able to gather, Netflix and Twitter are king right now. Oh, and something called Tik-Tok(?) too. I don't know what that is, and I don't care enough to look it up, but it keeps getting mentioned all over the place. I get that everyone is cooped up a the moment, mostly against their will, but it would be nice to think that some folks might be using all of this new found free time a little more constructively, you know, turn all of this negative virus business into something positive? I realize that this just crazy talk though, as the majority of people seem to be quite content with their current schedule of whining into the ether while watching television all day... it's much easier than trying to do something creative!

As for me, I don't do the Netflix, and am of the opinion that complaining about things on Twitter serves absolutely no purpose, so I'm free to do plenty of other things. I hate to say it, and feel free to criticize me for saying it, but I think that old 'Rona showing up has actually been a good thing for me, at least as far as how I spend my free time goes [note: hearing of all the suffering that has occurred, and is still occurring, around the world, most certainly isn't a good thing for me, or anyone else]. I've been able to spend even more time outside, although cleaning up storm damage isn't exactly how I had planned to spend my spring (and most likely part of the summer too), but it does provide plenty of exercise, so I can't complain too much.

I've been spending most of my evenings doing one of three things - or more often than not, doing a little bit of each - sorting cards, writing, and drawing. I've been sorting cards off and on for over a year now, so that's nothing new, but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which has inspired me to do a little more each night, so that I might be able to get done a bit sooner (more on this below). As for the writing, I've had a few story ideas rattling around in my head for a while now, and have recently decided to finally try and put one of them down on paper. I find myself needing some research material from the library, but seeing as how they're currently closed, I'll obviously just have to work around that until they open back up. I don't expect anything to come from all of this, especially since the writing itself is probably, umm, less than good, however I won't have to think about this particular story anymore, which will hopefully free up some space in this old brain of mine. Drawing is another thing that I've been doing off and on for a couple of years now, I just can't seem to stick with it, despite really wanting to do so. I'm hoping that this'll be the time that it finally sticks, and if I'm really lucky, I'll start feeling comfortable enough to show some stuff on here.

The best part of all of this though, is that my time on the interwebz has been drastically reduced, I think I've averaged around thirty minutes a day over the last couple of weeks, and couldn't be happier about it! The only bad thing to come from this has been that I haven't been keeping up with the blogs, and even worse, I've unintentionally become "only comments on free stuff posts" guy. And of course I haven't been doing much on here either, I managed to grind out four whole posts last month, and am on target for maybe five or six this month. It's a good thing that everyone else seems to be picking up the slack, as it makes it easier to fade into the background.

This is probably a good time to mention that I didn't really have any direction in mind as far as this post goes, so... here's a couple of random things and then I'll bounce:

I don't remember exactly when it was, but sometime a little over a month ago, I thought that it might be fun to do a post about the progress that I was seeing from my year-long sort. I took a bunch a pictures, started the post, then realized that it wasn't going to make for much of a read, and subsequently scrapped it. I hate to think that I wasted all that time taking pictures for nothing though, so I'm gonna squeeze a few into this post and call it good.

At the time that the photos were taken, I had thought that I had finished up with the baseball side of things, and was incredibly proud of myself for being able to fit all of my keepers into one two-row shoebox (and still have some extra space), after all that was the point of this big sort, to try and whittle everything down to the things that were the most important to me. The only thing that wasn't in the box were the Ichiro and Junior collections (which were still in a binder), and the binders full of random stuff that's separated by team. Unfortunately for me, I had forgotten about the two binders of old-timer sets (Pacific Legends, Fleer Greats, SP Cuts, etc.), and by the time I got done with those, I had three more stacks, a few more names to add the collecting list, and not enough room in my wonderful little shoebox. As you'll see in a second, all of my other boxes are currently being occupied, and with everywhere being closed currently, I had to get creative and use an actual shoebox for those three extra stacks (sorry, no picture).

Here's a more current look at my football box, save for Eric Dickerson (still in binder), and two binders of misc. stuff (sorted by team). I'm not quite done with the football yet, I got sidetracked last week and started working on non-sport (no picture yet) stuff, which is going really quick. This box is going to have to be reorganized at some point, as the original plan was to put the old-timers on the left, and keep the newer guys on the right, but it got all screwy at some point, and I just didn't feel like going back and fixing it.

I've always been a binder guy, so it's been a little weird putting stuff in boxes like this, but I thought it would be easier to have everything together when I go to start making lists. I'm kind of enjoying the space that's been freed up by emptying so many binders though, so while a lot of this will probably end back up in binders at some point, I think I might hold off for a bit, and enjoy my new found extra space.

And here's what's left to do, binder wise. 75% of this probably basketball, with the rest being abandoned sets that need to find a new home. I've been a little hesitant to start the basketball portion of the sort, because I still don't know what I want to do about some of the nearly completed sets from the 70's. Heck, I don't even know what I want to do with some of the completed 70's sets. Like a lot of collectors, I don't ever go back and look through completed sets, and in recent years, have developed the mindset of why have it, if I never look at it? Part of me wants to just pull out the players that I want to collect, and sell the rest. The other part of me says to keep the completed sets, finish the nearly completed sets, and just pull out the players that I want to collect and keep the rest of the sets separate -- that way if anything ever happens to me, the sets can be put back together and sold. This seems like the smart way to go, I just don't know if I want to have a bunch of partial sets sitting around taking up space, when I only really care about the cards of 15-20 guys from those sets anymore.

The rest of the basketball here is already separated by player (I did that last summer), but I haven't been to crazy about all of the space that those binders are taking up, and if I continue to go this route, I'm going to have to start at least three more binders just finish putting away the rest of the basketball cards that I have stacked all over the place.

Oh, and I've mentioned my binders of miscellany twice in this post, so I might as well provide an update on those as well. Before last week I had two binders going for each of the three sports, which wasn't too bad, but I decided to take a look through them and see if there was anything that I could live without, apparently there was, because by the time I got done I only had one binder for each of the three sports. A lot of that junk, er... I mean... quality cardboard, will end up being tossed into the Free Stuff Friday mix, so stay tuned for that. Speaking of Free Stuff Friday, I'm getting way too many cards for my once a month giveaways, so I'm thinking that I'm gonna take Brian, and now Chris', lead, and start doing them on a weekly basis, let people build stacks, then ship at the end of the month. I still have some stuff that I want to finish up first, so I'll wait until May to start doing that.

I've been able to weed out four full monster boxes worth of stuff (I know, there's only three in the picture), mostly abandoned set builds, which feels really good, and seeing them makes all of this sorting seem like it was worth it. The cards on top of the boxes are mostly keepers BTW, I just haven't put them in their respective boxes yet.

Phew... that was a tad more sorting talk than I had planned! I guess this is what happens when I go a week in-between posts. A few more things, and then I'll bounce... I swear it this time!

I hit up the post office last Wednesday and got all but three of people's claims from the last Free Stuff Friday sent out, and the other three will hopefully go out this week (I ran out of stamps). I've already heard from a couple of people who got their stuff, so if anyone hasn't received theirs yet, I would imagine that your stuff will arrive sometime in the next couple of days.

Wednesday was also grocery shopping day, which here usually means going to the Walmart. It's been a few weeks since I've looked at anything that wasn't food related, so I decided to go check out the discount DVD/Blu-Ray bins, and was quite surprised to see this sitting on top of the $5 bin...

This has been on my to get list for three years now, but has been a bit out of my price range. I think the last time I looked it up was around Christmas, and it was still in the $20 range, so five bucks was too good of a deal to pass on. I guess I should point out too for those that don't know, or don't care, this was the last Japanese made Godzilla to come out. I could give two sh*ts about the terrible Godzilla movies that Hollywood keeps making, but I still get all squishy inside for the Japanese Godzilla pictures.

I don't think I'll enter it, mostly because I think he might have trouble finding something for me if I were to win, but I did want to mention that Adam has returned to blogging, and is currently running a very generous contest. It looks like it's pretty easy to enter, and you still have a couple of days to get in on it, so head on over and get yourself signed up, provided that you haven't already done so of course.

I see too that, Matt, has started up another new blog, so you should go check that out as well. I haven't read any of the posts yet, but it looks like he's doing his usual and posting on a near daily basis, so no one can say that he's not doing his part to try and take your mind off of all of the negativeness out there. Hopefully I can catch up on this blog later in the week :)

I think that covers just about everything. And I'm pretty sure that I've exceeded my recent thirty minutes of internetting per day average here tonight (Sunday), but we're currently under yet another severe thunderstorms watch/flash flood watch/high wind watch/tornado watch, so I've had a bit of extra time to ramble this evening... aren't you lucky!


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.