The week that was

The feeling of days and weeks merging together seems to be the new norm for a lot of people, and I suspect too that depending on where one lives, the melding of months might not be too far behind. Hopefully some of the more dire "news" out there isn't to be believed, because if so, years could end up being indistinguishable by the time all is said and done.

Days and weeks bleeding together is nothing new to me, nor is years, those seem to be merging fairly seamlessly in recent decades as well. I believe this to be a byproduct of getting older, of course in my case it could also just be a byproduct of not spicing things up enough, I am rather set in my ways after all.

For the most part, I can usually only tell the weeks and months apart by weather changes and/or doing something/going somewhere out of the ordinary, the latter being increasingly rare as of late, that being said, last week did end up being slightly less ordinary... and now I'm gonna proceed to bore the spit out of you by talking about it!

[This first thing was already discussed, and shown, on Twitter, so my apologies if you've already seen it -- feel free to skip to the next section if you have]

I think that it was just in the last couple of weeks or so (I don't feel like looking for the post to link it up here) that I covered some of my year-long sorting project. In it I mentioned that I had run out of two-row shoeboxes, and needed another one. With everything closed, it's not exactly easy to find such things, and I wasn't about to pay the crazy prices (gouging?) on Amazon, so the only thing left to do was to make one... and I did!

Looking back at it over a week later now, I still think it looks good, although I wish I could get a picture of it without the phone camera giving it a bunch of funky angles. Nothing is glued or taped in, so if I ever want to get another "real" one, I can just take out the inserts and have my shoebox back.

I didn't really need at the time, but decided to make another one anyway, so Monday morning I played around a bit, and came up with this one:

Pretty cool, huh? I even took a few more pictures to show a fellow on Twitter...

Like the first box, nothing is permanent, but the dividers stay snug thanks to the combs. I really like this box, and now that I've started using it, I can honestly say that it works just as well as any store bought box, maybe even better? OK, it's not better, but it is just as good!

Tennessee is slated for a partial reopening later this week, so in theory I could go to the print/copy/card shop in town and get a couple of boxes, but I like my homemade ones just fine, and don't really see the need to buy any more. Besides I'm sort of the mindset now that if I ever need any more, I'll just make them, I have quite a few shoe boxes -- including one more big one, that could easily be made into another 4-rower. I'll come back to sorting in a minute or two, but I'm trying to do a linear post here today, so bear with me.

So that covers the highlights from Sunday and Monday.

Tuesday wasn't terribly exciting, but I did get a message from my friend, Marc, letting me know of incredible find that he had come across earlier that day. Since it was a private message, and I don't know if Marc shared it publicly (or wants it shared publicly), I'll have to leave out what it was, but will say that it was something that someone had offered up for free, and was something that is very near and dear to my heart. During our exchange, I lamented that such things never happen to me (especially out in the middle of nowhere), which unbeknownst to me, may have set universal doings into motion.

Wednesday was a garbage day, and even though I've mentioned it before, but for any new readers, I live in an area where there is no curbside pickup, so you've got to take your garbage and recycling to a central collection point, sort of like a dump, but not really a dump. Coming from the "big city", this took me a while to get used to, but is now something that I look forward to, if only because it provides an opportunity to find, and ultimately bring home, more junk. It's also not that far away, so it's not like I have to commit a whole morning/afternoon to doing this, which is nice.

Technically speaking, scavenging isn't permitted, but also isn't stopped if one goes about it in an orderly manner, which is good, because I've found quite a few neat things there over the years -- always from the recycling bins, not the GARBAGE garbage... that would be gross... and isn't really possible anyway.

It's not uncommon for me to pluck bottles from the glass bin, as I've always got ideas for projects involving glass, but on this particular day, it ended up being a treasure trove... of sorts!

The bins have three separate compartments, each with it's own sliding door, so if one section is full, you can move on to the next one. The only way that one can really get something is if a compartment is nearly full, otherwise it's just not possible to reach in very far. On this day, they were nearly full, and as is often the case, a lot of stuff was in garbage bags, and I am almost always compelled to tear open any reachable bags to see what's inside, which is what I started doing on this day.

The first bag, which was actually heavy duty, and double bagged. For lack of a better expression, gold, in the form of 50's era consumer glass (jars, booze bottles, etc.) came spilling out of the first bag that I tore open. These would be considered worthless junk to most bottle collectors, but not me, I love pretty much anything that's older than me, and the 1950's are considerably older than me, so I'm more than happy to bring home such things (or at least to go through them).

This is getting a bit long, so I'll just skip ahead a bit and say that I ended up tearing open, picking through, and ultimately taking out seven bags of glass. I was trying just to pick individual things out of the bags, especially given all of the broken stuff, but it was taking too long, so I figured I'd just grab everything and sort through it at home. I was starting to draw some stares by the time I was done, which is usually code for it's time to stop, but I was done anyways so it was okay. I had kind of been in a zone for about twenty minutes, so imagine my surprise when I started loading the first bag and noticed that a) my hands were covered with a red sticky substance, b) I had apparently forgotten to put on the work gloves that I always take, and c) that red sticky stuff was blood... my blood!

I would later find that I had about a dozen cuts, nothing too deep mind you, but still enough to spill Jon juice (how's that for a description?) all over. Thankfully I always have hand sanitizer in the car, so between that and plenty of isopropyl alcohol when I got home, nothing ended up getting infected. After loading all of the bags, I also noticed that my back was kind of hurting, and not a normal kind of ache either, but more on that in a sec. First...

Two bags were opened when I got home, this was all of the non-broken stuff.

Pretty much everything is from the 40's through the 70's. Not everything will be kept, but there were a couple of notable items, including a glass motor oil bottle (they stopped making those in the early 50's), an old embalming fluid bottle, and multiple cork-top medicine bottles. Given the dirt factor, as well as all of the crap inside the jars, I'm thinking that these might have been in either a barn or shed that may have come down in one of the recent storms.

So anyways, my back was already aching pretty good in just the time it took me to get home, so I didn't end up doing much the rest of that day. Trying to sleep that night wasn't easy, and I really ended up doing myself in when I tried to put my socks on the next morning. I felt a sharp pain, and cramping set in almost immediately, which was bad enough that I had lay right back down. I honestly thought that I might've tore something, but now I don't think so, I think I strained a muscle when getting the bags, and probably made it worse when attempting to sock myself. Thursday would be no fun at all, lots of cramping, lots of spasms, and since the strain(?) is somewhere behind my left lung, there was much pain if I took too deep of a breath.

I was really thinking that I had seriously injured myself there for a day or two, but as of this writing (Monday), things are much better, which is good, because I have way too much to do do to be laid up for weeks or months with something like this. I'm in pretty damn good shape (not bragging, just sayin'), so lifting 30-40 pound bags shouldn't have affected me like this. The only thing that I can think is that it must've been the angles that I had to twist into to grab the bags, either that or it was just simply a matter of not stretching before I started lifting them. Either way, I think I may have lucked out and avoided serious injury this time, hopefully I'll be more mindful of such possibilities in the future. And hopefully too, if I continue to get better, I might be able to go through...

... the rest of these later this week. They'll be a lot of broken stuff, old breaks, and new from either my theory of a collapsed structure, or from being tossed in the bin, but there should still be a lot of intact stuff as well.

Because of the pain I was in, Thursday and Friday were pretty much a wash.

Saturday and Sunday were better, pain-wise, but it was raining like an SOB, so I was pretty much stuck inside all weekend. I decided to make the best of this situation, and tried to get more sorting done. I had taken a few weeks off from the big sort, but before I did, I had finished both the football and non-sport keepers, which left a ton of basketball to do, and then maybe a couple of hours worth of baseball to finish -- baseball it was!

Behold... the final keepers for baseball! Other than the Junior's and Ichiro's that I still have in a binder, this is everything. I didn't count how many binders that I took apart, or how many monster boxes that I went through to get here, but I finally got here, and I couldn't be happier with the results. The whole point of this sort has been to reduce my collection to the things I care about the most, and for the most part it has worked. Even if I emptied the Junior and Ichiro binder, all of my baseball keepers would still fit into these two shoeboxes, and that's exactly the sort of thing that I was hoping for. The football keepers fit into one shoebox (sorry about not taking a picture), and the non-sports fir into one two-rower as well (yep, no picture of that one either). The Basketball keepers are gonna end up requiring a little more space, but will still be reduced considerably by the time I'm done, then I'll just have to start figuring out what I'm going to do with all of the non-keepers.

I realize that this week of mine may not have been too terribly exciting for a lot of you, but for me it was somewhat notable, notable enough that I actually knew which day was which, and can still remember what happened on each of those days! Now the question is, will I be able to say the same about this week when it's all said and done?


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

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.