The View From Wisconsin

I have hit a milestone in my card collection.

Yesterday, I stopped in at my local hobby shop to get a "jumbo" pack of Topps Series 2 Baseball cards, and happened to notice that he had for sale the complete set of the 1987 Topps Baseball set, in a binder, for $12.50. When I asked about it, he said it was part of an estate sale, and they were just seeking to get rid of some inventory.

So, along with the packs of this year's cards that I got, I walked out with the binder to finally complete my '87 set. But I didn't know until I got home what effect that had on my collection.

I did my usual updating of card sets, adding the '87 set to the main count and the new cards to the '08 set - in a turn of irony, the 2008 set is now my largest incomplete set, now that I have finally completed the '87 set. Yes, as you can probably guess, I use Excel spreadsheets to track them all. (I'm such a geek, I even track the cards I get via ToppsTown.com, the online-only cards that Topps is touting as a bonus for card collectors.)

When I added in all the cards I'd just received to the totals, I saw a very odd thing - I now have exactly 35,000 baseball cards (give or take a few that I may have missed). That's 72.6% of all 48,218 of the cards that I own.

Trying to put that in perspective: I could go over to Miller Park (capacity of 41,900), put one card on every seat in the stadium (that'd take a while, I'd suspect), and I'd STILL have over 6,000 cards left over. In fact, I could put all the cards that I own that were released since 1983 out there, then only take the duplicates from 1981-82... and I'd still have a few cards left over.

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UPDATE: Wisconsin Avenue is finally open between the five corners (Main Street, Wisconsin, Park and Oakton Avenues) and the lakefront. The beachfront of Pewaukee Lake is still closed, however; when you're driving Northeast on Wisconsin Avenue, you can see that the lake level is about at the same level as the road, and the water is still almost up to the sidewalk on the beach side. The sandbags, though, are still in front of most establishments along the streets.

Sarah and I also went to downtown Waukesha, and the Fox River has subsided greatly. The water levels are pretty much back down to normal, and everything's pretty much back up and running. You can still see the after-effects of the flooding, though, if you look hard and long enough.