A Moving Discovery

This summer will by my 7th wedding anniversary.  I never really noticed how long that really is until we were moving this past month.  It seems to me that the length of a marriage can be measured similarly to how people determine the age of a tree.  But in our case, rather than looking at the tree rings, we can look at the tonnage of stuff we've accumulated.

In the past seven years, my wife and I have moved an astounding (to me) five times.  It's astounding to me because I lived in the same house for my entire life until I moved to college.  After two years at junior college, I moved back home until I got married.

After getting married, my wife and I first moved from our one-bedroom apartment into our first house.  Living in such a small apartment meant that we didn't have much stuff to haul across town to our new house.  We lived in that house for three years before packing up and heading to Omaha.  During that three year span we accumulated quite a bit more things, so we used the biggest truck that we could rent from UHaul.

In hindsight, we would have been wise to pare down our belongings before we left for Omaha.  But, the wife and I are not very good at getting rid of items we haven't used for a while because, who knows, someday we may need that deli-meat slicer we've never, ever used.  Yet we hauled that deli-slicer and countless other items 600-miles where they sat in storage for three more years.

Our fourth move came when we left our first dwelling in Omaha, one half of a duplex in downtown Omaha, for the safety of a house in Omaha 'burbs.  We once again rented a large UHaul truck and, with the help of my brother-in-law, dragged three-bedrooms worth of stuff across town.  Again, it would have been wise to get rid of our excess belongings, but we skipped this step that most sane people would have completed.

For our latest move, the wife and I decided to donate many of our useless-to-us items to our local Goodwill store, yet we still managed to fill 65+ plastic bins with our stuff (most of which are stacked in our current garage awaiting our probable next move later this summer).

All of this useless back story (kudos to anyone crazy enough to have read this far) is meant to set the stage for my "moving discovery".

Had, at any time during the past five moves, my wife and I discarded some of our "useless" items in our house before a move, the below item would have probably been one of the first to go.  Somewhere, packed away all these years, my wife stumbled upon this album which she thankfully set aside for me to glance through.

What a great relic from my card-collecting youth.  The funny thing is, this album was a hand-me-down from one of my lifelong friends, who dabbled in card-collecting with me when we were in junior high school.  He was a great collecting friend because he was also interested in basketball cards, especially Shawn Kemp.

I know that this wasn't my album because on the inside cover, along with some nifty stickers, is his name and address (which I decided to block out, even though neither he nor his family live at that house any more).

Incidentally, Wade has gone on to become one of the three professional athletes with which I went to high school (along with the Hochevar siblings, Luke and Brittany.  Readers of this blog know that Luke is a pitcher for the KC Royals and his older sister Brittany is a beach volleyball player, who has partnered with the likes of Logan Tom, Holly McPeak, and, most recently, Kerri Walsh).

Wade has had a successful career as a professional steer wrestler, including winning the $100,000 prize at the 2008 Calgary Stampede, but has had a couple of season ending injuries keep him from NFR success.

Back to the album, the back cover also features some more baseball stickers (all of which were on the album before Wade gave it to me.)

Since I don't have much blog-worthy material these days, I'm going to spend the rest of the week featuring the three different card collections that I decided to store in this album all those years ago.  But, fear not, there is nothing in this album that I'll be using to fund my early retirement.  Just a bunch of cards that I'm glad did not become "cards my mom/wife threw out".