On Hiatus Usually the titles I choose for "The Grand Scheme" are oblique references to something related to the Tigers or card collecting or what have you. This time it is much more literal. For the time being, I'm going to hold off on producing new "Grand Scheme" posts. This will come as a major disappointment to some of you, including my lovely wife who, in addition to helping me sort and pack the thousands of cards from my giveaway, has told me that "The Grand Scheme" posts are by far her favorite on the site. And although her vote counts for like, 10,000 votes on this sort of thing, my vote counts for like, 10,005. Sorry, babe. Barring some modicum of reader sentiment towards me keeping the Grand Scheme right now, I'm putting them on hold.
But Dan, no! Whhhhhhhhy?
For one, they take a lot of time to put together. A lot of internet scouring and reading and quote selection and such as. In the last month or so, my work schedule has gotten increasingly hectic and I just haven't had the time to devote to these as I would have wanted. Also, in a month I'll be starting Grad School, and with work showing no signs of slowing down I'm expecting a major time crunch.
For two, this baseball season is killing me. The Grand Schemes are fun because they allow me to comment on the Tigers, collecting and the baseball season in general by recapping what's going on in the greater scheme of things (get it?). But with the Tigers' season sinking fast, there's not a whole lot more of analysis and commentary that I can give other than "They're fucked." And although I can perhaps suggest ways that they could un-fuck themselves, or prevent said fuckage in the future, I fear that my comments will come off as the negative, profanity laden, and/or holier-than-thou rants that the internet is known for, and that I don't like reading. No thanks. I've already sworn more in this paragraph than I have in the last three months of published posts. Think of the children.
So for now, "The Grand Scheme" goes on the back burner. I envision bringing it back when life settles down--the offseason seems an appropriate time for this--and doing so at a scheduled regular interval. In the meantime, everything else about the blog will continue as normal. Seeing as how I average .0001 comments per Grand Scheme post, I'm guessing that most of you won't even notice the difference.
Chchchchanges Also, it appears as though this blog is a wee bit antiquated. I was clued into this when I noticed that my "google followers" gadget in the sidebar stopped working because my template was too old and crotchety. I'll consider this the wake-up call to do the blog re-design that I've wanted to do for over a year. This means that I may or may not actually do a blog redesign, but know that I really want to. On the docket: New (but similar) template. New "Grand Cards" logo. A Grand Cards banner. Additional functionality, but probably not much because I don't know a whole lot about the internet so I'll just take what I can get. These things should update the look and feel of the blog so that it will only be a little bit outdated instead of a lot-a-bit.
Checklists and Galleries To-be-expanded. This is probably a bad idea, since I'm behind on 2010 checklists and galleries, but I'm in the process of putting together comprehensive by-year checklists. This is a by-product of receiving a ton of cards from the 80s for which I have no checklists at all. So, I'll be putting these together, posting them in the "checklists" section, and then doing galleries if and when I complete a team set of these older cards. Then I'll start filling in with internet-gleaned galleries.
And that's really it, I'm hitting the pause button on "The Grand Scheme," continuing everything else as normal and hoping that life can slow down to the point where I can catch back up to it. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
