Collection & Personal Update

[Matt]

Roughly 8 years ago I compiled a checklist of cards I wanted to target to build my "40 Card Collection" - I created a number of rules to give myself a challenge (e.g. only 1 card per issue, only the best pre-war players) and picked my favorite card within those guidelines (OK - I wasn't able to stick to 40 and turned it into an 'X Card Collection'). Along the way (as is the case with any good collector) I got distracted with a number of other collecting projects as well as created an "Other Cards" collection for cards I liked that didn't fit into my rules (they weren't in the main collection so I wasn't violating any rules - right?). The journey was a lot of fun and a number of you helped me along the way (thanks!) but I was finally able to get a single instance of every card I was after and upgraded several by mid 2013.

For a number of reasons, we decided to move overseas in the summer of 2013 (not to worry - cards are all in a safety deposit back in the US). The timing worked out well from a collecting perspective as I was at a point of closure with my collecting targets, and that plus the challenge of getting settled in caused me to kind of fall off the face of the earth as far as my card collection was concerned. Recently, I've had some time and started lurking on the forums (thanks for taking care of that whole Mastro situation!) and while I'm still not planning re-entry to active collecting, I wanted to share this update in case anyone was wondering what happened to me (or, more likely, what happened to a certain card). Plus. it gives me an opportunity to show off my "finished" collection which is a sort of brief pictorial overview of the evolution of pre-war cards (that sounds more important than it actually is).

http://picasaweb.google.com/mwieder Click on 'X Card Collection.'

To all my Net54 friends - glad to re-join you all!