Just because my book Confessions of a Baseball Card Addict is finally finished and available, doesn't mean that my journey is over.  On my walk last night, I thought it would be a fun idea to add a thirteenth chapter and post it online for everyone to read who is interested.  Think of this not as an online post to be read while skimming over a thousand other posts, but rather as an online chapter of a book to be enjoyed when you have time to do so.  That almost doesn't need to be said, because ... well ... look who's

For those of you who didn't have a pleasure of knowing him the way my family did, I'd like to tell you a little bit about my dad. Duane Jones was born on August 12th, 1954.  If you knew him as a child, you may have pitied him.  He had a rough childhood, enduring abuse and neglect.  He even lived in a tent on the beach for a while.  As a teenager, you may have known him as a druggie, a thief and a street racer.  His car was equipped with a police scanner, which would be useful to "exit stage right" if

Do you remember what you were doing in 2014?  I remember I was contemplating supercollecting my childhood hero Jose Canseco.  Players like Jose Abreu and Yasiel Puig were dominating baseball.  Obama was our president, my son 11 years old, a foot shorter than me and his voice was about 3 octaves higher than it is now. Another thing that I was doing was waiting for a redemption.  A 2014 Topps Strata jersey / auto #/25 of Jose Canseco, to be exact.  A collector from Sweden reached out to tell me he had the redemption card for sale.  Rather than spend a

Part of me wanted to give a daily update on how things were going, but frankly, it has been a whirlwind since I announced my retirement on June 30th.  The massive amount of time I used to spend obsessively checking eBay, the forums and social media for Canseco cards I didn't have, has not been replaced with naps and leisurely lounging poolside.  No, it has been replaced with quoting prices, accepting payments, pulling cards, packing them up, driving to USPS and ghosting them from the website.  I have just crossed the one month mark a few days ago of not

Day two picked up where day one left off:  shipping out LOTS of cardboard.  I have to say, a part of me is having a lot of fun filling people's want lists.  Whether it is the stack of Pinnacle Museum cards going out to a collector in Sweden, or several blank back cards to a collector of errors.  Heck, even those who were just starting their collecting journey and decided to pick up some cards that more advanced collectors wouldn't think twice about.  I guess you can say that I'm happy so far that everything seems to be going to