Birthday Plans; Grooming School Update; Baseball Cards

Currently Reading: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I keep getting two questions lately. The first is what I plan to do for my birthday, which is next Wednesday. Here's what I have planned so far . . . got it? No, seriously, I don't have any plans for my birthday. At some point CC and I, or maybe the family, will go out and have dinner or lunch or something, but that's about it. I was thinking also of maybe taking a trip to the zoo. It's been a while since I've seen the bears.

I also don't know what I WANT for my birthday either so if you were hoping to get some ideas here, sorry. With so many other things going on right now I just really don't have the time to sit down and come up with a gift list. Normally I'd ask for books or movies but there really aren't any out right now that I've just GOT to have. I've still got a large stack of books waiting to be read anyway. My latest addition is a rare Haruki Murakami book called Norwegian Wood. Actually it's a two book version and it's not RARE necessarily. You can still find it in stores. What makes this one a little different is that it's an earlier version with a different translator. As I understand it, there are some subtle changes that make a fairly big difference. We'll see.

The second question I keep getting asked is how grooming school is going. I've managed to survive the first section of the course which is really just the "official" version of what I've been doing for the past year. Most of the work has been memorizing certain terms and phrases used to describe my job. The tricky part comes when what the book says differs from what actually goes on. You must remember, working in a grooming salon is just like working in any sort of service-related industry. You've always got two different versions of how things happen. You'll always have the company's official method of solving problems or completing projects and then you'll have the ACTUAL method that evolves from that and is passed on from employee to employee. It's always important to learn BOTH methods though because while the current employees may be used to doing things a certain way and may insist that it works best for them, that doesn't always mean it's really the best way. You've always got to consider that the company has spent a LONG time developing its training methods and they've stuck with them for a reason.

So where am I now? Well I'm now in part two of the course. It's broken into 3 sections. The first part is all about what I've been doing up until now. The second part is all about how to groom dogs and the third part, which is optional, is all about cats. That cat one takes a LOT longer, mostly because of the 1 year practical experience requirement. You think that sounds like a long time? Honestly, depending on the salon, it may take that long for you to groom enough cats to be considered skilled at it. Most people don't take their cats out to be groomed.

Anyway, where I am now. Now I'm at the very start of shaving and scissoring. This is just the most generic part, the foundation if you prefer. I've been learning how to shave a dog and how to use the scissors to trim up certain parts, like the feet. After I get through this section I'll be working on patterns for specific breeds and so forth. This part will take 11 weeks total so I'll be working at it for a while. Most of the time will be spent getting actual experience grooming dogs though. There's not nearly as much book work.

Had an interesting moment the other day. Monday, while CC and I were grocery shopping, I picked up 5 packs of baseball cards. I've been doing that the past few years. It's fun opening them up and looking for your favorite players. Last year I didn't have much luck. I got several GOOD players, just not my favorites. This year though, I counted myself lucky that I snagged both an Ichiro Suzuki card and a Hideki Matsui card (my favorite players). WELL, in addition to those two cards I also picked up one of these:

That's Derek Jeter, the shortstop for the New York Yankees. Good player, decent guy. Doesn't get into trouble off the field. Hasn't had any freakish weight/muscle gains like a certain player for the San Francisco Giants. He's reliable and doesn't cause major distractions. Here's what I didn't know at the time I first came across this card. As a joke, the guys who work these baseball cards up digitally inserted President Bush in the audience and Mickey Mantle in the dugout. You may have heard about this in the news. What does that mean? Well, it means this ONE baseball card is currently worth more than it cost me to buy all 5 packs. In fact, when the story first broke, this card was actually selling for almost $400. Crazy right? Sure is. The price has dropped down to a more reasonable level at this point but it's still worth quite a bit more than your average cards and it will continue to grow in value over the years as more and more people lose theirs :-)

I also looked up a few other cards I've got sitting in my little baseball card box in the closet. I have a few now that are worth a bit of money. Oh, nothing dramatic. So far nothing worth more than $75 but still, that's pretty good for a baseball card. And remember, like most collectibles, baseball card values go UP not down. The trick is, well there isn't really a trick. It's luck. Unless you've got money to actually INVEST in them, getting baseball cards worth money is all in the luck of the draw. I had a 1 in 10,000 chance of pulling this Derek Jeter card and I did.

The only real problem in all of this is how it hurts the casual collector or the kid just looking for his favorite player's cards. As you can imagine, when this story about the Jeter card broke, boxes of Topps cards flew off the shelves. One guy noted that he'd bought two boxes, each box containing 30 individual packs of cards, just to get one Jeter card. That's 720 cards out of circulation right there. That's two fewer boxes of baseball cards sitting on the shelf at your local store for the kids to buy.

Don't worry too much about that though. Soon Topps will release their second series of cards and you've still got the other companies out there who also produce top-of-the-line cards. So I guess this is really more of an annoyance than anything else.