#5,000

There are pros and cons to tracking all your various collections in an Excel file.  On one hand, it has spared my from buying doubles for my Pirates collection countless times.  It makes it easy to track my needs and wants.  It indulges the nutty, ocd part of my brain.  And it makes it easy to hit arbitrary and largely irrelevant milestones!

Sure, it also means that any new additions must pass through a tedious entry process.  Kind of my own Ellis Island, where cards are first queued up to be entered.  Once they're in the spreadsheet, they go to one of a couple boxes, a holding area until they're finally ready to enter the freedom of Binderville.

But let's ignore that time consuming and maddening process.  Milestones!

While entering some of my recent TTM successes into my spreadsheet where I track all of my autographs, I discovered I just crossed the 5,000 autograph mark.  Many of those are Pirates, Steelers, or Penguins.  But there are also a couple thousand TTM autographs of other teams and a growing certified auto collection.  Fittingly, number 5,000 is a player who I loved watching during his brief time in the Burgh on a set that is among my favorites of all time.  The scan didn't take nearly as well, but the card looks sharp in person.