At the beginning of the year, I set out nine hobby related goals intended to drive my reintroduction to the hobby of my youth. Some were easy to accomplish, and some I knew would be a stretch. Exactly what goals are supposed to be. At the sixth month mark, I did a mid-year assessment and put in an honest reflection of how I was doing. Now it’s time for the same year-end exercise so I can see where I succeeded and where I didn’t, before heading into 2021. So without further adieu, here we go (with mid-year included for transparency):

Establish www.apackperday.com and get into a routine of publication - I want to make this blog another stop on your content consumption when it comes to Hobby related reading.
Mid-Year Assessment: Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!!! My, my that’s funny. If this was real, I’d be placed on some sort of Blogger Improvement Plan with bi-weekly check-ins with my manager and HR.
Year-End Assessment: Eight total posts in the second half of the year doesn’t exactly make people want to come back for more. Inconsistency equals irrelevance. That’s how I’m going to have to look at it heading into 2021.
Establish YouTube channel with pack rips, completions of sets, Mail Days, eBay sales - Much like with the site as a whole, I am to integrate myself into the broader collecting community through YouTube.
Mid-Year Assessment: STRIKE TWO!!!!
Year-End Assessment: I bought a USB powered ring light and a small tripod for my phone. Does that count?
Buy/Obtain 100 cards from 1976 Topps - Begin hand collating the Topps set from the year of my birth, 1976.
Mid-Year Assessment: Now we’re making some progress. I have managed to obtain 13 separate cards as of today. My favorite of which is #554, Catcher Ray Fosse of the Oakland A’s. What a beautiful action photograph. Especially for some time during the 1975 season. Film rules.
Year-End Assessment: Finally a success! According to my TCDB collection for the ‘76T set, I managed to trade for, or purchase a total of 98 beautiful cards from the year I was born. The set is 14.8% of the way complete, with the cards sitting in their own 600 count box waiting on the day I acquire enough of them to put in a binder.
Complete 1988 Topps Base and put in a Binder - Self explanatory.
Mid-Year Assessment: This goal was completed in March or April. It took awhile to find the last two cards in the condition I wanted them to be in, but Bill Buckner and Steve Sax did eventually find their way into their forever homes. Now for extra credit, I’m working on the 1988 Topps Glossy All-Stars. I only have one left. I have to make up for my failings in Goals 1 and 2.
Year-End Assessment: After completing the Glossy All-Stars set, I moved back and finished off both ‘87T and ‘86T. The last card for the 1986 set was Ryne Sandberg. Do the two extra sets make up for the abject failure of Goals #1 and #2? I didn’t think so.
Re-binder/Re-page all previously completed sets - All the sets I completed as a kid have been entombed in cheap binders and whatever page brands I could afford. The pages are often of different sizes, so they don’t line up. I want to rebind everything in new consistent binders and Ultra-Pro pages.
Mid-Year Assessment: I’m gonna give myself a pass here. With the Coronavirus currently running rampant throughout the World, the production of binders, pages, and top loaders came to a screeching halt. For a few months, they were unavailable. I’ll get back to this one later.
Year-End Assessment: The binders and pages that have been purchased in the second half of the year were allocated to the mid-80’s Topps sets and working on personal player collections. This is something I still want to do however, and will look into it in 2021.
Buy one of 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout or 1984 Fleer Update Kirby Puckett - My two biggest bucket list cards.
Mid-Year Assessment: This should still be possible. With Trout on a seemingly linear trajectory with regard to the card value, it might have to be the Puckett. But I’m okay with that.
Year-End Assessment: The Trout card seems to have stabilized in the last few months, but I never could justify pulling the trigger since we had other priorities as a family. I bid on a couple of Pucketts in December but lost each time, and I want to make sure I don’t overpay on a Buy It Now. I tried on the Puckett, but it didn’t line up. One reason is that I want a PSA graded one, either a PSA 8 or 7. I remember reading about the number of fake Puckett ‘84 Fleer cards when I was a kid, and I’m sure there’s even more now. Getting a graded one is my way of making sure the one I buy is real. Problem is, there’s a lot of competition for PSA 7-8’s.
Sort and organize the 5000 count boxes - Look through and sort in some way the five 5,000 card boxes I carried with me all those years.
Mid-Year Assessment: After I published the goals, I actually found two more of them. So there are actually seven. The boxes are fairly well sorted, organized by brand and year. Now though, I am taking it a step forward and putting all those boxes into my Collection on the Trading Card Database (Handle: @CSUBiochem). This way I can see what I have and use the duplicates to trade with other collectors. I have gotten rid of over half of my 2019 Topps Chrome duplicates in trades through this platform. It’s gold. So I need to put the rest in there.
Year-End Assessment: This is done actually! All cards are sorted by year and brand, from 1982 to 2020. Cards of 1989 Upper Deck are no longer spread out in multiple boxes. Everything was painstakingly stacked on our kitchen table and completely sorted. Then I took out the ‘ol label maker and made divider cards for each set. Sets that I want to work on building and putting into binders were taken out of the 5,000 count boxes and put into a BCW card house. That makes it much easier to store the cards that come in through TCDB or Twitter.
Obtain 1% of Mike Trout All-Star Game 2019 Gold Cards (Serial #/2019) #US146 - By the end of the year, I want to own 21 of the 2019 Serially Numbered cards for Trout’s 2019 Topps Update #US146.
Mid-Year Assessment: Yeah. I went for it with this one. I’m up to 29 of them with one more on the way.
Year-End Assessment: Final tally: 34 of them. Actually had one more on the way, but the new seller didn’t put down all of my address on the envelope and it got returned to him. At least I got my money back for it. I still check for this card too. I can’t help it. But the ones that get posted are listed from $25-$35. They don’t come up very often either. It’s like there’s no inventory. Wonder why that is?
Donate commons to Twitter Hashtag @Commonsforkids - I was planning on getting rid of junk wax commons by sending them to a charity that gives baseball cards to kids.
Mid-Year Assessment: I am on the fence on this one. I still might do this, but I have really enjoyed trading with people from around the country through TCDB. There might be a home for these cards yet.
Year-End Assessment: On my last big box to sort, I was trying to unstick yet another bricked block of Collectors Choice. I finally asked myself why I was doing that? So I stopped. Out came the priority boxes and all those bricked cards are getting sent off soon. I’ll let the kids unstick them. To round out the boxes, I put in random handfuls of all the late 80’s / early 90’s junk I don’t need cluttering up my house. There’s two boxes, so probably around 5,000 cards total. But that’s just getting started. Once I see where I’m at with set builds on those cards, the dupes are gone.
I posted on Twitter recently that 2019 was the year where I got back into collecting cards, and I bought literally everything I could get my hands on. 2020 started off the same way, but then the devastation of the Coronavirus wreaked havoc on Humanity (and the card industry!). I have found retail once since March, and that was for Topps Update at the end of November. 2020 instead morphed into an experiment to see other types of product. For example, instead of buying a crap ton of Gold Label, I completed the Gypsy Queen and Stadium Club sets. I’m also trying to get every insert of every set I started. The result is that I’m still spending too much coin on sets and individual cards where that money might be better served being spent elsewhere.
I want 2021 to be a much more focused year. I’ve got a list of PC Cards that I want to look for first and foremost when I’m scrolling through eBay. I’ll also spread these throughout the course of the year. 2020 taught patience. I don’t need to receive 2-3 envelopes a day of random eBay purchases. I need to wait, and look for the right deal. I’m learning hobby lessons daily, and implementing them in how I manage the collection. And that, is considered a success!
2021 is going to be a great year! So stay tuned, and stay safe!
JDM