State of the Collection....Looking Back on Last Year's Goals

Happy New Year!!  May 2013 be a prosperous year for you and may your favorite team finished just behind the 2013 World Champion Chicago Cubs!

Each year on January 1, I look back on the goals I set for the previous year and grade myself.

Here's what I wrote a year ago along with my grades and comments in red (after all, I'm a teacher and I still use a red pen to correct my students' work).

Goal #1: Keep up with the new releases. Topps cranks 'em out, I scoop 'em up. That's just the way it is. Warts and all, Topps is baseball cards. I'll continue to add all of my usual suspects. I'll wait and see on any of the new lines, though Fan Favorites is coming back and I do plan to add those to the collection.
Grade: A    
Comment:  This was made much easier for me thanks to BrentandBecca.  I love getting everything though one dealer and in one shipment.

Goal #2: Ease off on the parallels and inserts. I tried in 2011, but when the Platinum diamonds came out, I fell off the wagon. This year I'm going to stay sober....for the most part. I plan to get any insert Cub cards, but no more relics, autographs, fake patches, and parallel sets.
Grade: A  
Comment: In 2012 I didn't stumble and stuck to the plan of buying only autographs and relics of players missing from my collection.  I really didn't need any more relic cards of Marlon Byrd!

Goal #3: Finish the Cubs team-issued set from 2002. I have three cards left and for over a month, not one has seen the light of day. I will continue to hunt them down!
Grade: A
Comment:  One by one, the missing three showed up.  In fact, a reader was nice enough to send me the Lee Smith card I needed.

Goal #4: Add more autographs I picked up several last year and plan to keep that up this year. Instead of adding the entire autograph set from Topps flagship, I plan to only pick up cards of players that I have no autograph of. That way I don't end up with four Tyler Colvin autos. One should have been plenty!
Grade: A
Comment:  I went a little crazy with this one and now my autograph collection is over 100 cards.

Goal #5: More Oddball team sets Every day I do a search on ebay for "Cubs Team set" and I've found some interesting items. My oddball binder is bursting and I will probably need to start a second binder this year. I hope to fill it!
Grade: B+
Comment:  This one gets a little harder each year.  As I do my daily ebay search, I'm having a harder time finding sets not already in the collection. But I was able to add some oddballs like the Shakeys Pizza cards and Sega Card Gen.

Goal #6: Keep adding to the player collections of Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ryne Sandberg, Andre Dawson, and Darwin Barney. I stumbled into the player collection arena last year and started to put together a decent assortment of cards. My Barney collection is off to a nice start, so I'm curious to see how it will play out....and how he will play out.
Grade: A
Comment:  The collection has increased to the point to where I needed a second box for the cards....and Darwin Barney played out very nicely in 2012.

Goal #7: Continue sharing, daily. After three years I've settled into a decent routine for blogging and see no reason to slow down.
Grade: A
Comment:  There were 365 days in the 2012 and 368 posts.

I had a nice year!!