It's the end of 2016, let's see how I did

To say the least, 2016 was an interesting year.  We lost 3 great sports icons (Howe, Ali and Palmer) plus many more celebrities.  The USA elected a business man for a president, which should make 2017-2020 very interesting.

2016 was also a year of upheaval for me.  I was able to get my wife down to Florida with me, and we started the process of finding our "forever home".  It took over 4 months from the day we started seeing houses until the day we signed the contracts and obtained the keys. That certainly affected the blogging and collecting process for me (as it would anyone, I believe).

I decided to pull up my January 1st post last night to see what I wanted to accomplish, and how I did. 

Here's the seven items I wanted to accomplish in 2016.

1.  I'd like to get more envelopes in the mail.  If you want to get picky, I accomplished this.  26 mailers sent out in 2015, 27 sent out in 2016.   To be honest, that's not how I wanted it to go down.  I think more PWE's will help increase this number.  Grade:  D

2.  Finish off a couple of vintage sets.  OK, I could make excuses about how for 4 plus months my life was a little upside down, and I didn't have much time to do anything card related.   Yes, that's true, but it's also bull shit because I had more than enough time to finish off my '64 set at the end of the year, but instead I went off on a tangent and started the SNI Hockey project.   Grade:  F

3.  Player PC 1 of 1's.  2016 will also see more attention paid to my Sakic, Thome and Lawrie PCs.  White whale cards??  Didn't happen.  I did a fair job though increasing by Sakic and Thome collection this year, but Lawrie didn't get a whole lot of attention. 
As far as the 1 of 1's go?   Fail.   The rest of it I'll give myself a C-.

4.  Get back into a regular writing rhythm.  This will be the toughest of them all.  108 posts during 2015 isn't enough, in my opinion.
This post is #130 for 2016, and with 4 months being a total write-off (bad pun, I know), I feel that the last part of 2016 saw my interest in blogging come back.  If I can write 17 posts in November and 19 in December (including this one), there's hope yet.   Have to shoot for at least 15 per month in 2017.
Grade:  C-

5.  Try and get rid of some of the excess.  Well, I did do that to some extent, by donating a bunch of cards to local charities down here after I moved in.  What I mentioned at the beginning of the year was getting set up on COMC with selling some cards.   I started to put cards together the last couple of months to send off, but never got around to it.  A grade of D- for only fulfilling a portion of this goal.

6.  Read, read and re-read.  It's time to start reading more blogs.  Fail.  Fail.  Fail.  Shame on me.  If there was a grade Z, that's what I would get.

7.  Clean up the blog a little.  Wow!  I actually did do something right this year!!  I really worked on my want lists, rearranged the layout a bit and changed the font.  What I'd like to do is figure out to make a new header for the blog.  I'm going to be generous on this one and give myself a B+.


I have a few things that I want to accomplish in 2017, but that's tomorrow's post.  In keeping with the one card rule for any post I write, here's my Sakic card of the year.

This was part of my secret Santa envelope that Jim from GCRL fame sent me.   This is the rainbow foil 2008-09 OPC retro insert, #98/100!!  I don't know if I had ever seen one of the rainbow parallels anywhere, so getting this card in the envelope was truly unexpected and totally amazing.   Thank you Jim!

To all those out there who actually still read this blog, I want to say thank you for sticking by me in 2016.

Have a great and safe 2017, and whatever you do tonight, please do it safely. 

Thanks for reading, Robert