Weigh-In #51, Plus Four Oddballs

Posting a quarterly update on my progress in organizing and purging helps me in a number of ways. It gives me an opportunity to look at the big picture, and helps with both motivation (if I do well) and guilt (if I don’t).

I know it’s not the most exciting subject for a post, which is why I’ve included four carefully selected oddballs.

The numbers here reflect changes since October 12th (not QUITE quarterly this time around)…

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:  Regular readers of The Shlabotnik Report will remember that I bought two large boxes of cards back a couple of months ago.  Because I knew that the vast majority of those cards would be coming in and going back out, I did not count those “temporary” cards in my totals… It would’ve needlessly inflated the numbers, and to be honest, I do the same thing with those junk wax cards which come in as part of a repack and immediately go into the recycling.

1989 Topps Sticker back Gary Carter

Net change in the collection since 10/12/14:  +354 (519 added, 165 purged)

Net change to the # of cards in the house since 10/12/14: -5,180 (1,574 in, 6,754 out)

2001 MLB Showdown Sean Casey

In the below figures, “to date”  means since I started tracking this stuff on 10/16/2011.

Total # of cards purged from the collection, to date: 10,595

Total # of cards which have left the house, to date: 41,862

Net change to the collection, to date: -2,546

Net change to the number of cards in the house, to date: -26,404

1976 Hostess Joe Coleman

Number of individual cards tracked in my Access database: 49,956

Number of cards that make up the sets flagged as completed in my Access database: 17,623

1998 Classic Update Red Travel Edition Cal Ripken

…which means I’ve got at least 67,579 cards in my collection.

Epilogue:  Looking at these numbers makes me feel like I have a long way to go, but that’s good because it makes me want to be more aggressive in what I purge.