I'm Back from Hiatus with a Heavy Heart

Hey guys and gals.  I hope after my eight month hiatus that I have at least a couple of readers remaining.  I hope that you are still out there and still collecting.  I have been reading blogs and even commenting on occasion, but I never really had the desire to post for most of this year.  I have no real reason for it other than life getting in the way.

As a quick catch up with what I have been doing, 2013 has been thus far the most personally difficult year of my life.  As some of you may remember I found out last year that my estranged father had passed away several years ago.  Surprisingly it was hard for me even though we hadn't communicated for over thirty years.  However, that was nothing compared to the gut punch I experienced on August 1st of this year.  On that day, my grandmother passed away at the age of 79 following a stroke/heart attack combo.  I lived with my grandparents for the majority of my childhood and for past ten years I was paying my grandparents back by moving back in and trying to make their golden years as easy as possible.  She gave me many things throughout her life, but the most important (at least for this blog's purpose) was my passion for collecting.  Not my passion for baseball cards, that came from my grandpa, but the passion for collecting in general.  My Mamaw loved to collect things and I saw that love for building collections from an early age.  She had a salt shaker collection, a figurine collection, a coin collection, and several other various types of assemblages.  Some people (even loved ones) would call her a packrat or a hoarder, which was true, but I could see beyond the obvious to the why.  All of her "junk" made her smile and she passed that love down to me.  My cards and baseball in general makes me smile and smiling is something that has been in short supply around here for the past two months or so.

It has been a rough couple of months, but I hope to get back to semi-regular posting at the least.  If anything just to keep myself busy.  Obviously, the big news for my team is the upcoming retirement of longtime franchise player Todd Helton.  I am not going to get into that today because I don't want to cheapen the previous paragraph with the relative triviality of my hobby, but I will discuss that among other things later this week.

I also want to mention that for the majority of my hiatus, I have been working on the 2013 Quarry Unlimited virtual custom card set.  I will be getting into that more following the season as I have once again made 1500+ cards featuring every player (plus some) that participated in Major League Baseball this season.  For those of you that may have missed it, last year's set was based on 1986 Topps.  This year's set is based on 1977 Topps with a few changes that (IMHO) improve upon the original design.  Again, I will get more into that in the future.

I know there are a few of you that I owe some packages to and rest assured that I will be getting those taken care of as soon as possible.  I will be contacting those of you that will be getting stuff in the mail this week and I hope you forgive me (and possibly even understand my reason) for being late.  If you do not hear from me this week and I owe you some cards, please email me and let me know.  I do not want anyone to be left hanging or shorted in any way whatsoever.

I hope I still have some readers left and I plan on getting back into the exploration of baseball in general and specifically the Rockies.  Until then, thanx for reading.