My daughter's in-laws recently moved from a house to a condo. A difficult time when the house held so many memories...and memorabilia.
I remembered my daughter talking about the boxes and boxes of hockey cards they'd found. The thing with all those cards, do you keep them all, save just your favorites, and what about value? There could be some valuable cards in those boxes.
It's been hot, and I needed some mindless chore to keep me occupied, so I volunteered to go through a box and make some order out of it.
When she said boxes, I pictured shoe boxes, but when she gave me the first one...it was a banker box, filled to the brim with a mess of hockey cards, all jumbled with no sense of order.
But, I love a challenge.
It took me two days, but I sorted those cards, first into brands:Score, O Pee Chee, Pro Set, and Upper Deck. I found some baseball and basketball cards mixed in as well. Second, I sorted each brand into individual years, as there's a new design each year. I still don't know what the years were, unless it was in large print on the card, the copyright was so small, my bifocals weren't enough.
Some years there were maybe 500 cards in the series, others more like 700. I broke each year down and put cards in numerical order, looking for complete sets. Some were fairly intact, others missing large numbers of cards. I put everything back in the banker box, all neat and organized.
What I want to know, Tom, is why there were 3 or 4 copies of each card, was this so everyone had their own? It made my task more difficult, for sure.
It was still hot and humid, so I got another box, this time a big corrugated cardboard box with what looked like the cast offs of the collection. There were some really old card from when there were only ten teams (now 30, I think). They had been in a scrapbook, attached with a fold of masking tape, which ruined the back side of the card,
I found a whack of cards that were missing from the cards I'd sorted from the first box. I also found more baseball cards, and golf cards saved in plastic binder sheets. The collection is now organized and fills the banker box and a smaller box I had handy.
It kept me sane over the last week when it was too hot to move, almost too hot to breathe. But I can't sit still with nothing to do, and it seemed to hot to do anything. This was a mindless task, and I, at times, felt like I was playing cards with myself.
I don't want to spend another summer like this, with my place so hot that fans just don't make a difference. But, just watch, I'll get an air conditioner for next summer and it'll be the end of this series of over the top hot summers.
2 comments:
When it comes to a/c, my feeling is even if you only use it for a few days or a week, it's worth it! When it's cold you can always bundle up, add another blanket etc. But when it's hot, there's only so much you can take off and you're still hot!
Sounded like a good system you had to organize the cards. We lived in my inlaws' house for 4 years when they were in assisted living and then passed away. It was in the San Diego area and about 5 miles from the ocean. They didn't have air conditioning and it about killed me the days it was needed which were primarily August and sometimes into September. The house would get up to 90 degrees. I work at home, it was very stifling. Hubby inherited the house, long story short we eventually moved to Arizona when he got aanother job. He fixed up the house and sold it. If we had srayed, air conditioning would have been a necessity. Its worth it for the short amount it might be used.
Betty
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