Guys' Night In

I write this from a city in panic mode.  The reason?  It's going to be 33 degrees tomorrow in New Orleans.  It might even snow.  There are a few things that we do really well here in the South: cooking, eating, sweating, crowd control, and holding our liquor.  But cold?  This is not in our skillset.  People are losing their minds, including the folks at my wife's place of work. 

You see, she works on the other side of this body of water called the Mississippi River around which all the places we know and love are built.  There's no doubt in anyone's minds that the bridges will close, so she is at her parents' house so she will be able to get to her job (she's a chemist, and her lab never really closes).  She brought the dog with her, so tonight it's just me and thousands and thousands of cards. 

There's also a distinct probability that my place of business will be closed tomorrow, so I may have a day off to blog about baseball cards.  In case that doesn't happen, I need to take advantage of tonight's alone time to get a few posts started.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can't tell, but it's now been a few hours since I wrote that sentence above, and guess what I've been doing? 

Having a damn blast, that's what.

Actually it was very dorky.  It wasn't any one thing, but more of a symphony of dorkiness.  For example, I wore the Adventure Time Finn onesie with attached feet my wife got me as a joke for Christmas - incredibly warm though socially unacceptable.  I listened to the latest Chvrches album (shamelessly catchy Taylor Swiftian teenbop nouveau with big electronic balls and sporadic cursing).  And dorkiest/awesomest of all, I had me a Griffey sort.

This was not your average Griffey sort, either.  As you can see on the right side of this blog page, I surpassed the 7,000 Griffey mark. 

The best thing about tonight's sort apart from the milestone is the duplicate ratio of this particular group of new Griffeys.  The final counts put it at 142/82, that being 142 total cards, 82 of which are new adds.  That's a dupe ratio of 1.731, well below my average.  This is true despite the addition of 37 specimens of a card I didn't need in the first place:

They were cheap, shipping was free, and I am hopeless.

Remove that admittedly unwise purchase from the equation and the dupe ratio drops to 1.28.  This is the result of more disciplined buying on COMC and, to a far lesser extent, eBay.  There's more money changing hands per card than the eBay lot purchases of yesteryear, but the benefits are obvious.

I also got another post started tonight, a return to form of sorts where I show all the Griffeys from a particular set/year.  Excited about getting back on track.

Here's to a warm night indoors with a nice scotch and a favorable Griffey count.  What more can a dorky man ask for?