Jon’s 2011 Collecting Goals/Resolutions

I make a point to not announce New Year’s resolutions in my real day-to-day life.  Actually, strike that.

I make a point to not create New Year’s resolutions for my day-to-day life.  I find them to be a silly exercise for children to tell their parents because the parents force them into it.  “I promise to clean my room every week, mommy, and I’ll feed Bingo every day, and make sure my homework is done before I play videogames.”  They’re rarely made to be adhered to, and more often than not lead to depression (or possibly indifference) when the realization hits that you won’t reach your unattainable-from-the-outset goals.  Sure, you could make reasonable goals for yourself, or even broad ones, but we are creatures of habit and the calendar change isn’t going to make us break that habit.  Generally speaking, inspiration for these types of things needs to come naturally, not forced.

All ranting aside, this is a card blog, and resolutions make for good blogging fodder.  Having an audience that may make you own up to your promises could be a good motivator, and having an audience to support your goals by being enablers and fellow card-junkies makes it easier to keep the progress coming.

I do have a couple personal goals that are card-related for this year that I’m going to keep private for now.  If they are obtained, you’ll all hear about it, but here’s what I’m looking to accomplish in 2011.

PLAYER COLLECTIONS

Number:  Currently, I’m at 3 players.  I’d actually like to increase this to somewhere between 5-10, leaning more towards 5.  Part of the reason is I feel my collection is a little unbalanced.  I’m only collecting pitchers so far.  Two of the three are current Cubs.  I want to branch out.  I want a slugger.  I want another older player, so I have more to look for in the old boxes I rip besides Greg Maddux.  I have thoughts on this, but I’ll go more in depth on another post.

Current collection size:  I’m going to use my Progress report post from a little more than a month ago as my guide here.  I was at 6 months, so by 1 yr, 6 mo I hope to have my collections reach somewhere around…
Marmol – Currently 26 (30.59%), Goal 50.  I feel most of these newer cards will come in the form of 2011 products/parallels
Dempster – Currently 30 (17.34%), Goal 75.  Again, a lot of 2011 will help.  I wouldn’t be too surprised if I’m able to break 100.
Maddux – Currently 236 (3.97%), Goal 275.  I’m keeping this number more conservative in anticipation of adding other players.

I also want to complete 2 years worth of cards for each player.  Maddux may be the easiest as I only need 2 more Sterling cards to finish 2010, and early junk wax years may not be too tough.

POSTING

I want to at least to maintain my current output of blog posting on here.  I know as the wedding gets closer, it will be tougher to find the time, but I stay up late and get little sleep as it is, so we’ll see.  No set numbers on this, just keep the blog moving along.

I wish I could say I’ll be commenting more.  I simply don’t think that’s realistically going to change for the time being.  As I’ve mentioned before, I typically only have time to either read people’s blogs to catch up, or write my own post.  I can read during lunch at work, but can’t login anywhere to comment.  Also, I’ll blame the wedding here too to cover my bases.  Maybe the second half of the year, I’ll be a more active presence and chime in along with what you guys are talking about.

I also want to post 25 packs on A Pack To Be Named Later in 2011.  This averages out to about one every other week, which seems manageable.  I have plenty of older packs that haven’t been featured, especially non-sports and I’m sick of seeing –David beat me to the punch on them!  Even though he does a great job with his write-ups!  U.S. of ALF should have been mine!

BOX BREAKS/REVIEWS

I want to do a bunch of this.  I’m a critic at heart and by nature, and one of the things that appealed to me most about starting up this blog was having another forum where people could read my bias.  We’ve been at this for about a year now (as of January 11th), and we’ve had a whopping 18 reviews!  I want to get a couple group breaks going, which will allow more box breaks/videos/reviews on here, and we’ll be opening plenty of new stuff (mostly to flip) as we’ve been doing.  It’s going to be a very exciting time for us.  We have big things planned for this blog and January should show the beginnings of it.  Hopefully you’ll be there to share it all with us.

CONTESTS

I want to hold more of these as well.  The Pack Lottery Contest (your chance to enter is ending tomorrow night!) is going to be intense and a hell of a lot of fun.  We want more contests, more giveaways, more interactivity, more fun, more free cards for everyone!  It’s about time we bring the Community to Community Gum.

Okay, so that’s about it, and I think that’s plenty.  We’ll see how I do next when the recap comes in 12 months.  Synchronize Swatches!