2013 Year End Review

The past few years I have, like many bloggers, put up a list of goals. Some call it their New Years Resolution. Me I call it my State of the Blog address.  So in preparation for the 2014 address it's time to take a look back at the goals I set for myself and see how I did.

1.    I'm going to try and pair down my overwhelming inventory of cards I don't want.  By selling, trading and even giving them away and in the process picking up stuff I do want and making room in my man cave.

Well I did manage to trade some stuff away and I sold some on ebay, but to be honest this really didn't happen. This is pretty evident since I've been boxing up stuff to store and make way for our baby coming early next year.
Strike one

2.    Continue working on organizing and inventorying my Brewers team sets and cards and start working on organizing my Packers cards.  I made a lot of progress this year and I've almost completed all the Topps team set issues from 1971 to present and most of the traded and update sets as well.  Once that is done I want to focus on getting all the Fleer, Donruss, and Upper Deck flagship sets done and then I can start seriously working on all the rest.  For the Packers who have a lot more years of cards to acquire and some really expensive ones on the older end I'm not so worried about those.  I'm going to concentrate on working my way backwards through the years focusing on Topps first.

Well I can say while I've kept up with my Packers want list actually organizing my Packers team sets didn't go anywhere.  I'm happy to say that I have just about every Topps Flagship Brewers team set done, except for a few of the rarer early 2000's traded set cards I need.  And I still need to start focusing on my other issues.  I also still have a big box of random Brewers cards I need to go through.  So I'll have to call this one a draw.  Ball one.

3.   I would like to put together the oldest Milwaukee Brewers team set.  The 1909-11 T206 Milwaukee Brewers Minor League 4 card set.  I don't care what back the cards have, but I would like to have a decent condition copy.  Why spend the money on it if it's just going to have been an old spoke bait card?   And I would love if I could get all 4 cards for under $100 bucks total.  Impossible? Maybe, but I love a challenge and I'm patient.  

Well this one is a total fail. I didn't pick up any of the four cards in the set. I did make a few attempts at bidding on some on ebay, but never did win any.  Strike two.

4.  More trading!!  This year I was able to get about 30 trades done.  That's chicken feed for some of you guys, but for me it was almost a three fold increase from the last year and this includes the 4 months I pretty much was unavailable for trading so I'm very pleased. And I worked out some great trades, had a few people solicit me, and over all I'm really happy with what I got.

Well I did manage over 20 trades this year, which certainly isn't more trading than last year, but I did trade some more. So I'm calling this one even. Most of my trades came earlier in the year, since my late spring, summer and early fall was spent working away from home.  I did manage a flurry of trades at year's end to bump my number up a bit, but I probably could have done better.  I'll say that this is Ball two!  Count's even.

5. More contests?  Maybe. I still plan on doing the Super Bowl and World Series contests.  The additional playoff game this year really screwed up the window for getting a World Series contest together and factor in  a couple of the pennant races weren't decided to the last game of the season, well it makes for exciting baseball, but gave me a lousy lead up time to the contest.   Still I'll see what I can do.

This one's a wash too.  I still have my both my annual Super Bowl and World Series contests and I have my next Super Bowl Contest coming up.  More contests? Nope, but I didn't have any less.  Ball Three, counts full.

6.  I've been bitten by the minifigure bug and you best not get to close, I hear it's contagious.  Anywho at the end of 2012 I started yet another blog, The Minifigure Collector, mainly because the page on this blog that I had dedicated to Legos and minifigures wasn't cutting it.  So if your at all interested in that kinda stuff check it out.  My goal there is to keep tweaking it into a great little fan site. 

Well hell finally something I actually did.  I find myself falling in love with Legos all over again.  I bought quite a few sets this year and after seeing some of the previews of next year's sets I'll be picking up a few more. I really love the Marvel and DC Super Heroes line and the old universe Star Wars. I've found that it's really just as cheap to buy a set then try and pick up the minifigures separately, and to be honest while Legos aren't cheap for the price of a blaster of cards you can get a nice set and you don't feel like you got ripped off when you don't pull anything.

I'm still tweeking the blog, but overall I've had fun writing and building with my renewed hobby.  Plus I can justify the hobby by saying that I'm just stockpiling Lego's for my kids and holding on to them till they're old enough to play with them.  Easy single to left field, runner on First!

7.  Keep my set collecting in check.  Another hold over from last year, but a good one that will probably be in my State of the Blogs for the foreseeable future.  The sets I'll be going after are Topps Baseball Flagship and update, Topps Football, Topps Allen and Ginter and maybe Gypsy Queen, but I see that they are bringing back the SP high number cards.  I think I'll forgo Heritage this year, as 1964, while not a bad looking set is not one of my favorites and putting together the SP part is a bitch.  I'll try and stop buying so many random packs and put that money to just picking up team sets and individual cards I want. 

This is another goal that I can probably say I did all right on. I put together my Topps Baseball and Football flagships, started my Allen and Ginter, but only got one box so that's way behind.  Didn't do Heritage or Gypsy Queen, but did pick up a box of Heritage against my better judgement and I paid for it, by not getting anything worth a darn in it.  I also, against my better judgement started a Score football set. I was able to pick a hobby box up for almost as cheap as it use to be.  I had better cards come out of the Score rack packs than the hobby box.  Anywho I'm calling this one a successful bunt, runners on first and second.

8. Writing more and better. Good luck with that.

Ahhhh, emmmmm, well I'll let you be the judge of that. I still find I write quick and still make middle school grammar mistakes and hit the Publish button up there way too fast before rereading my post.  

I'll call this a outfield pop up, one away.

9. Continuing to work on my vintage 1963 Topps baseball set.  Slow and steady.  Maybe saving up for the big one to add to the set.  You know who!

I know I probably picked a few 63's up this year, but I really didn't add too much to the set.  Foul tip.

10.  I  finally made myself pick up the brush and pens and start drawing and painting again.  While I had tried to make myself do something everyday last year, that didn't work out, so now I'd just like to be productive and maybe get to the point of showing some of my stuff in a professional show.  I've retooled the 13 Tenets into more of a showcase from my studio than a rant blog and I like where it's going.

I'm happy to say that while I didn't do a ton of drawing I did pick up my pencils and pens and get a few things done. Check out my art blog 13 Tenets of Cynicalbuddism to see what I did. It helped that I had a few commissions from friends and some wedding presents and other gifts to do.  While I like being able to draw what I like, it's also nice to have a goal and a theme presented to you.  Single to left, all runners advance, bases loaded.

11.  More TTM (Through the Mail) autos!  I was really bitten by the TTM bug this year and had some great success.  I'm planning on hitting spring training hard this year and I'd like to try and do 100 TTM's with better record keeping.  And I really want to hit my Brewers TTM project hard. Some of my big names last year included, Will Clark, Dale Murphy, Randall Cobb, and Jordy Nelson. 

D'oh.  Well as you can see from my sidebar where I was keeping track of my TTM's I never got close to putting out 100. And out of the 28 or so I sent I only got 5 back. That's Spring Training and regular season. Yikes that's pretty terrible.  I am pretty happy that Topps put out some rookie and first flagship issue cards for some players I really want to try and get next year. So I doubt my goals will be so lofty, but I'll be sending some TTM's out next year for sure.

Ground ball, into double play, the side is retired.

Overall, I didn't really get much done on my collecting goals. But after actually sitting down to write this review, I realize it wasn't as bad as I had thought.  And I have to remember these are just a nice guide to what I want to accomplish.  I'll have my 2014 State of the Blog address sometimes after New Years.  Will it look like last years? Maybe, but I can guarantee that with a baby on the way some things are really going to change.