State of the Blog - 2012 Review

I started doing these State of the Blog, I actually called it State of the Collection, a few years ago after I saw a few other bloggers do it, they might have called it their blog new years resolutions or something like that.  Anyway I started doing them because  I needed to focus better. On the blog and on my collection. In January, I posted this years State of the Collection. In that blog post I set out 8 goals for this year, lets look back and see how I did.

1. More Trades. - Well I managed to get 29 trades done. I might get one more done before year end who knows. Not too shabby considering that I bought way less product this year and I was also out in the field for about 3 to 4 months.  Over all I'm really happy with all the trades.  I made trades with long time trading partners and made some with new people as well.


2. Limit my set building. - This year I said I was only going to build a few sets.  Topps flagship Baseball, including update, and football, Heritage, and Allen and Ginter. However I also started a Score football set and bought a box of Topps Prime even though I knew I wasn't going to put the set together.  So not too bad really.  And the Score boxes were good to me. I was able to sell off the "hits" to cover the price of the boxes, which were a good deal when I bought them.  And I also dipped my toe in on Topps WWE Heritage.  I only bought a few blasters to complete my set, but now I want to complete a few of the inserts sets as well.

3. Finish my Player Collection tabs. - I'm happy to say all but the Prince Fielder page is done.  I'm still struggling if I really want to have him up there now that he's gone.  I've still been putting his cards in his part of my Brewers PC box if I happen to get some, but I haven't gone after any of his cards this year.

4.  Finish off a few more sets from my needs list. I finally finished off my 2009 Upper Deck Baseball set.  With a little help of the blogging community and a few singles pick ups I finally did it this Black Friday!! And I'm really close to a few  more.

5. Start a vintage set.  - I decided to try and put the 1963 Topps Baseball set together.  Why?  Why not?  After picking up some really cheap lots and a few not so cheap, but good deal, star cards, I've amassed about 13% of the set.  And at the onset I knew this was a set I would be building for years.  I've been also putting together the 1981 and 1982 Topps sets.  I'm almost done with those too.  Maybe time to move on to 1980?

6.  Get back into drawing.  Well this has been hit or miss.  The first part of the year I was really gung ho to try and get back into drawing and painting and then that fell off quickly. But in the last month I've really started to pick it back up.  I finally finished a few wedding presents that I had promised over a year ago. I also switched gears on one of my  other blogs 13 Tenets of Cynicalbuddhism and turned it from a rant/blow off steam blog to my art blog.  Check it out I've posted some of my latest art over there.

7. Post more on my other blogs.  Again here I'm pretty bad.  I've been toying with shutting down my Brewer and Packer-centric blogs because mainly I really don't have a lot to contribute.  I thought I'd try harder to put up team set posts and other cool card pick ups, but to be honest that really hasn't materialized.  And on top of that I decided to start another blog to keep track of my set building  interests. The Minifigure Collector. Yeah I'm a glutton for punishment. But if your into Legos or any other building sets and minifigures check it out.  I'm slowing adding links to cool Lego and Minifigure websites and blogs and updating my collection as well.

8. Send out more TTM's.  I'm really happy with my success in the TTM realm this year.  I wish I'd have kept better records of the TTM's I sent out, but I think I got close to 75% back so that's pretty sweet.  I had a lot of non-sport success and I really would like to try to get a few more Olympic cards signed from the Topps set.  I also plan on hitting my Brewers project harder next year and focus on just one brand to try and finish it.


All in all a really good year overall.  I'm looking forward to next year and I'll have my 2013 State of the Blog address up after the 1st.  And I'd like to thank all of you readers out there that take the time to read what I write or at least stop by to look at the pretty pictures.  I'm sure I'll have a few more posts before the new year, but just in case the apocalypse was a day late, Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Years everybody.