mmm, crow...tasty.

Close you eyes for a moment..(keep reading this at the same time...come on, multi-task, multi-task!). Imagine your baseball card lair. The area where you..ahem...organize your glorious collection.

Some of you have nice, clean binders full of neatly collated cards from each set, organized chronologically by release date. Others have a multi-tiered spreadsheet where you can easily reference a particular card and know exactly which binder and even which SLOT to find that card in.

Still, others have this... Or perhaps this...

How many of you are looking at this right now?

Or maybe this?

While none of the above are actual photos of my card-sorting station, believe me, these are not far from the truth. Since the laptop and scanner are located in the upstairs living room, a vast majority of hobby boxes, packages, cards of interest, toploaders, penny sleeves, and what-have-you's all tend to centralize on the china cabinet table.

It is a definite eyesore to be sure, and it is a constant accordion of material, it expands, it contracts. It is never-ending.

So finally a week back we were going to have some company over for dinner. The mandate from the high commander was to clean off that china cabinet table so you could actually, you know, SEE the china cabinet.

This was a reasonable request, as it allowed me to break out my archaeological gear and pick through the rubble hunting for buried treasure long since forgotten.

So here is the crow. This is your big payoff for visiting today. While I typically will feel excited about finding some cards that I have tossed aside to scan later, these particular cards gave me that, "uh-oh" and "Doh!" Homer slap-to-the-head feeling...

Topps '52 Yovani Gallardo Red-Auto Hand-Numbered #28/52. Hand-numbered autos are the best. On card autos are even better, and an auto of a pitching phenom is the best! What happened when I received this package that caused me the distraction to pitch it into the rubble that is my workstation, I cannot say. But I REALLY like this card and it is long overdue to thank Beardy for taking a great hit and sending it my direction.

Beardy and me have a bit of a competitive edge to us when it comes to negotiations. It is really hard to explain, but it has been there since the beginning. I strongly suspect that we have a common personality type that causes us to dig in and stick to our guns. I suspect that a game of Monopoly between us would end badly! I appreciate Beardy for his conviction, and also for putting up with mine. Negotiations were fierce and drawn out, but we ultimately came to a agreeable accord and Yovani headed out west to chill with the likes of Lincecum and Tommy Hanson.

Now the "doh" and the crow!

Also included in the package was this...

Oh no.........it's the Hot Tejada. I feel really horrible about this. Back in April Beardy devised a fun little game where he wanted to take a mysterious Miguel Tejada relic and have it included in trade packages to bounce back and forth around the country in a "hot potato"-like manner, where ultimately the music stopped at the end of the season and whoever had the Tejada had...something...happen.

Either way it would have been a fun thing to track throughout the summer and to watch people post about it, and do to my lack of organization, I ruined it. Beardy, I sincerely apologize for ruining the Hot Tejada and am prepared to receiving my flogging as a result.

Sigh, what can you say? This hobby can eat you up alive, and sometimes you gotta face the music. The beat goes on!