Movin' On Up

It seems like life is intent upon making it tough for me to keep up a semi-regular posting schedule.

We ended up spending a long weekend out of town due to two job interviews coming up, both of which would move us closer to Pittsburgh.  So I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

And better yet, when I arrived home I had a pile of bubble mailers waiting for me, and a case of 9 pocked pages.

Yes, a case.  Ten boxes of 100 pages.  As I start transferring my Pittsburgh collections, I'm quickly realizing that 1000 pages is not going to cut it.  But at least it's a start.

Now the biggest problem becomes how to organize said pages.  Steelers and Pens are easy - I'm keeping my meager player collections separate, and then everything else gets divided into insert/parallel pages, or base card pages.

But the Pirate collection is (and should be) more meticulously organized.  So far I paged most of the 70's and early 80's, but those years were easy.  In most cases one, and at worst three, manufacturers.  No inserts, subsets, and an incalculable number of parallels. 

But for more recent sets, I'm still debating whether I should leave holes for the cards I need, or simply reshuffle the pages every so often to account for new additions.  Leaving holes for base would be pretty easy, but doing so for parallels/inserts would be a far more involved task, and the odds of picking some of those cards up are small.

And then what to do with the oddball cards?

They neatly organize themselves into alphabetical order in my excel spreadsheet.  But how do you work in one solitary card in the grand scheme of binder pages?  Perhaps oddball issues and minor league cards will get their own pages at the end of each year.

With the number of times I've organized and reorganized, I really hope this will be the last big move.  Get the cards in pages, leave them in order, and just enjoy the darn things.

But doing that means I need to figure out a filing system that is both flexible and practical.  And if my thinking out loud is any indication, I clearly haven't reached that point yet. 

I'd love to hear about the organizing system other team collectors use, whether it involves binders or not.  I had always been a box guy, but I've found that I spend far less time actually enjoying my cards, and I manage to get the things out of order seemingly ever time I open the box.