Cal Ripken, Jr., 2001 Fleer Tradition Diamond Tributes #8

WARNING: Graphic images of a messy nature enclosed within. If you are a neat freak, germophobe, or any other variety of Type-A person, you may want to turn back now. This is what my living room currently looks like:

I am showing you this in an effort to shame myself into following through and getting all of these cards merged and stored, once and for all. After all, it's hard to relax on the couch when you've got stacks of loose cards and wayward shoeboxes cluttering up your line of sight. This poor Cal Ripken card has been waiting for a more permanent place for six months! In this instance, I've given myself a week and a half to get on with it. Most of the legions of cardboard pictured above are already sorted by year and brand. It's just a matter of combining them with the rest of my collection and getting them tucked away in a more sane and orderly fashion. A few small clusters of miscellaneous vintage (i.e. old sets that aren't close enough to completion to merit their own binders) need to be paged in the miscellaneous binder. I need to get off of my duff and start a long-overdue Orioles-specific binder...or five. And perhaps most of all, I need to cull out the scads of doubles (and triples, and quadruples, and...) and set them aside so I won't be caught flat-footed the next time I'm looking for trade bait. Piece of cake, huh?

If nothing else, let this serve as a cautionary tale. Whether you're buying a single rack pack at your big-box retailer or absorbing someone else's unwanted collection into your own, never put off the sorting and storage. It tends to snowball.