Unplanned Hiatus Over — This Time I Mean It

Featured Cards: 2007 Topps Turkey Red #1, Ryan Howard; 2000 Pacific Crown Collection #212, Alex Arias

I cannot pretend that I didn’t already make a “hiatus over” post the day before my last entry on this blog. For what little it’s worth, when I wrote it I really thought I would be returning to posting regularly. However, a combination of factors very quickly proved me wrong. The most important of these factors — one that I didn’t truly appreciate until the past couple weeks or so — was that trying to post these checklists at the rate I was producing them caused me to massively burn out. By itself, simply keeping up with the new issues and all the associated inserts and parallels, even with Topps is the only MLB-authorized manufacturer, really is a Herculean task. However, I was simultaneously maintaining/building the Phillies collection, reformatting the tracking spreadsheets as I go, and keeping up with all the other things in day-to-day life. Without intending to, I spread myself way too thin, and this blog wasn’t the only project I temporarily abandoned.

But, I’m back now, and this time I mean it. I will continue with posting the checklists, but it’s now obvious that there’s no way that one day I will have everything online in the manner I was shooting for — I’ll just have to view this a never-ending project. Furthermore, my hiatus allowed me the contemplative time me to realize that I needed to post more of my thoughts about the hobby, my feelings about my favorite team on the planet, and just plain show off my collection. Yes, the checklists served as a means to display elements of my collection, but not necessarily in the manner I would otherwise choose to do so.

Having said all that, moving forward I will predominantly post checklists by request. I have a few older requests I haven’t forgotten, and I will work on getting those online slowly over the coming fortnight or so. In the meantime, I have some other stuff I’m ready to post about as well. My batteries are now fully charged after being away for 11 weeks, and hopefully I be much more careful about avoiding burnout in the future.