******2013 Edition******
First off I hope you all had a wonderful New Years. I had a really fun New Years Eve spent with friends and family. Followed by a day of nursing a hang over catching up on the new Dr. Who and eating leftover party food.
Having already reviewed how my year in the collecting and blogging world went last year and seeing as we all survived the apocalypse it's time for my third annual State of the Blog address.
I know that you're probably tired of all the Blog Resolutions and such and that's fine. After all these post are more for the blog owner than the blog reader. It's nice to set your goals down and have them to look back on and to guide you.
Having already reviewed how my year in the collecting and blogging world went last year and seeing as we all survived the apocalypse it's time for my third annual State of the Blog address.
I know that you're probably tired of all the Blog Resolutions and such and that's fine. After all these post are more for the blog owner than the blog reader. It's nice to set your goals down and have them to look back on and to guide you.
I'm hoping this year will be a good year in the collecting world. This is the last year of Topps' current exclusive deal with Major League Baseball. I plan on writing a plea to the commissioner or someone to please, please, please make sure that doesn't happen again. Not that I don't love Topps flagship baseball, it is one of my favorite sets to put together, I just think a little competition would be great, but I'll concede I really don't want the hobby to go back to the way it was about 10 years ago with so many products it was almost impossible to choose or keep up. I would love to see ITG or Leaf get a license in one of the major sports. Just seeing what these two little upstarts can do with no official license makes me want to see what they could come up with if they had one.
So with out further ado here are my......
So with out further ado here are my......
Goals for 2013:
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.
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.
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.
The set has:
Dan McGagnn
Newt Randall
Shad Barry and
Stoney McGlynn
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.
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.
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.
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.
8. Writing more and better. Good luck with that.
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!
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.
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.
I think that's a good group of goals. Some hold overs from last year, but I've been seeing the same thing around the blogosphere reading others goals for the coming year. This year might be called the year of scaling back. For me last year was the year of scaling back. And I don't see this year the year for me to unscale back, but I'll hold the course. I promised the wife I'd be good and we are close to being out of short term debt. I doubt I'll ever be out of long term debt being a home owner, but I'll tell you owning your own home, while challenging, is damn worth it.
I also want to give another one of my new blogs a shout out. Nunaka Valley Farm. The wife and I do a fair amount of gardening up here in Alaska. At least what we can and this will be our journal of city farming for the next year. We added to the menagerie of our life by adopting 3 chickens last year. And surprisingly they are a lot of fun to have around. So if you're at all interested check out the blog. I don't have too much up there yet, but I've also set it up as a reference site for myself so there are links to all sorts of websites and blogs about city and urban farming and chicken raising. I'll eventually be posting a lot of last years successes and failures.
And of course I want to thank everyone who takes a little time to read what I write here. And don't forget to enter my 3rd Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web.
Cheers
CB out.
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.
8. Writing more and better. Good luck with that.
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!
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.
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.
I think that's a good group of goals. Some hold overs from last year, but I've been seeing the same thing around the blogosphere reading others goals for the coming year. This year might be called the year of scaling back. For me last year was the year of scaling back. And I don't see this year the year for me to unscale back, but I'll hold the course. I promised the wife I'd be good and we are close to being out of short term debt. I doubt I'll ever be out of long term debt being a home owner, but I'll tell you owning your own home, while challenging, is damn worth it.
I also want to give another one of my new blogs a shout out. Nunaka Valley Farm. The wife and I do a fair amount of gardening up here in Alaska. At least what we can and this will be our journal of city farming for the next year. We added to the menagerie of our life by adopting 3 chickens last year. And surprisingly they are a lot of fun to have around. So if you're at all interested check out the blog. I don't have too much up there yet, but I've also set it up as a reference site for myself so there are links to all sorts of websites and blogs about city and urban farming and chicken raising. I'll eventually be posting a lot of last years successes and failures.
And of course I want to thank everyone who takes a little time to read what I write here. And don't forget to enter my 3rd Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web.
Cheers
CB out.
