It's December 30th already?

Another year, come and gone, just like that.  A lot has happened over the year.  I dabbled in this, posted about that, and generally got through my first full calendar year on the blog without any major catastrophes.  I made a lot of trades, encountered a lot of new blogs, said good bye to a few of the old veterans, but most of all had a blast getting to know a lot of the regulars out there in blog land.

At the beginning of the year, I posted 7 goals for myself to attain for 2012.   It appears that I'm going to go   4 for 7 on these goals.

1.  Double the number of relics/autos in my Jays collection from 15 to 30.  Done.  I actually managed to more than double the amount of Blue Jays relics/autos in my collection.  #50 just came in this week, courtesy of Ryan over at the Ryan's Pitch blog.  Ryan sent me a nice auto of former Blue Jay Eric Thames:

Thank you Ryan!!

2.  Increase the number of completed sets to 25.  Not hitting this number is a big disappointment for me, but there's lot of reasons for it.  The main one is the lack of focus.  There are so many sets I have going right now that are less than 50 cards from completion that I should have hit 25 easily.  Hopefully before the 2013 baseball season starts I will hit that magic number.

3.  Increase the number of Jays cards in my collection to 3500.  I said at the start that this was a very aggressive goal, and it turns out that a lot of people out there tried to help me get there, but the last few weeks of the year saw me having less and less time to sort and catalog the plethora of cards the blogosphere sent me.  I managed to do some cataloging and sorting today, and the total rose to 2708, with the likely total after final clean up being around 2900-3000 cards of the Jays. 

4. Ship 100 bubble envelopes.   Done.  Very proud of that one, it means that I kept active with everyone out there.

5.  Hit 500 posts by the end of the year.  Done.  This is post #587 overall, another number I'm very pleased with.  As I tell my wife "it keeps me off the streets".

6.  Attend the National.  Done.  Spent two days there.   Loved every minute of it.  Looking forward to the 2014 National in Cleveland.  Why wait till then?  I'm a 90 minute drive from Cleveland, so I'll be able to attend multiple days and still be able to sleep in my own bed at night.  I loved Baltimore, but losing $130  in the budget due to hotel/parking fees just really sucks.

7.  Meet another blogger.  Nope.  No luck there.  Maybe some time in 2013.  I probably wound up passing a few bloggers at the National (and maybe at the Expo in November), but not knowing any of them face wise meant that this goal went by the wayside. 

Will I have goals for 2013?  Of course.  Gotta start the New Year off somehow!!  I will likely keep it at a modest total of 7 because any more than that will require a lot of thought, and I don't feel like doing that over the holidays. 

By the way, in case you haven't seen it, JBF's annual blog of the year voting is running right now.  Don't know how to get there?  Follow this link, and choose from any of the blogs listed on the right. 

thanks for reading, Robert