A look back on 2014

With 2015 right around the corner, and all the blogs showing the best cards, best sets, worst inserts, blah blah blah out there, I'd like to take a little look see at what I had planned for 2014 and see how well the year turned out for me. I made some not so lofty goals, because I felt it was far more important to have fun instead of putting unneeded pressure on myself trying to complete something that may be out of reach.

First though, let's take a quick glance at the goods - the best cards obtained during the year. If I had to look back and pick the best three cards I added to my collection, I will need to give the nod to these three:

From a group break run by Chris over at Nacho Grande, I lucked out by not only getting my White Sox, but securing this ùber rare Abreu diecut from one of the mini boxes. While prices on this card has been dropping over the months, there was never a plan for me to sell it. It's a fine addition to my throwbacks binder.

Certainly not a pull from me, this sweet relic card was a gift from the super insane (in a nice way) Wes from Jaybarkerfan. For a nerd like me, who gets a chance to play Star Wars dress up, I still geek out on the galaxy far, far away.

I was going to type that the three cards are in no particular order, but who am I kidding. Top pull from 2014 was this beauty I yanked from my LCS. Buy back auto of the best hockey player of all time. I think I was grinning for a week after this hit. Someone at my LCS wants me to sell it to him. Yeah - that's not happening.

Now, I like to look at the most popular posts for the year. The five most visited, in regard to page views:
1 - "I Walked Alone", discussing a visit to a card show in November. At almost 1200 views, I am pretty sure I am somehow stealing views from the video linked in the post.

2 - "Happy Birthday to Me", my 2nd anniversary post. Contests certainly draw page views, and 430 views made it popular.

3 - "Blogger Meet-up", a recap of DimeBox Nick and I hooking up at the Orland card show in February. Over 360 page views. I think the picture of an entire box of '75 minis made Night Owl visit the page at least 200 times alone.

4 - "Who gets post mail?", a post covering 6 different envelopes from 6 readers who sent me some great cards. I'm not sure what drove this post to 280 views, but it must have been interesting.

5 - "Card show visit", talking about a solo trip to the Orland show, with a side visit to Winston's for the greatest Irish soda bread anywhere. 225 page views on this post. There were some sweet vintage on the page, so I think that helped.

Personally, my favorite post with average page views concerned a multi-blogger trade I was a part of. Though my sad attempt as being Dr. Seuss was a close 2nd.

Ok - so that quickly recaps the big additions to my collection. So let's go into the way back machine, take a gander at the goals I had for this year and see how I felt I did.

Trades - I had put a goal of about 26 trades into my plans. I really didn't keep track, plus I less "make trades" and more "send out stuff to people". If I was to take a guess, I would say I fell short of the goal. However, to me, the idea of a trade is to get cards into the hands of people, and I did a lot of that, so I am going to say I did a decent job with this goal.

Collection - I had put goals to get specific binders to specific numbers. I WAY shot low, because all but one of those I beat by mid year. I set my goal for double play cards to 450 - I am at 779. My bunting goal was 250 - I hit 791. Throwbacks were going to get to 300 - right now I am at 583. And my Ben Petrick collections was going to be 90 - I missed that, currently having just 68. However, I had a Sportlots order to place which contains 14 Petrick cards so that gap will be closed in a couple weeks.

Organization - Organization was a huge goal, and I nailed that one. I have a fantastic grasp on what I have to keep, what I have to give away, and what I would like to add. Once I got my Zistle account moving with the initial card recording, everything flowed well. I have yet to add all my White Sox cards. I would like to do that, but it's low on my priority list.

Sets - This was the loftiest of all the goals, It's also the goal I really should have kept track of. I can't say if I knocked off 15 sets, because I kept adding sets to the lists. I think I completed 8 or 9 sets. I am also sooooooooo very close to a couple others. Feel free to click on my Wants and A&G Wants links at the top if you can help me out.

Blog - I didn't care about adding followers or readers. Thanks if you do both. Just know that numbers don't matter to me. I made a few changes to the links at the top of the blog, and along the side. I will keep tweaking as needed. I'll continue to write in a fun way, hopefully not bore you to death and maybe post a cool picture or two.

Is this one cool picture or two?

Tomorrow, we'll look to the future.