Six years

Six years ago today, "Dime Boxes" was born.

I don't remember many specifics about that evening in general. It was probably cold (as Decembers in Chicago usually are). Perhaps there was a light snowfall outside. A TV might've been on in the next room. It was, in short, a night like pretty much all other nights.

The most vivid memory I have about the evening of December 7th, 2011, was spending about an hour trying to decide on what I should call this blog of mine. At some point, the name "Dime Boxes" came to me and stuck, largely because dime boxes were (and still are) representative of so much of the intrigue and joy I'd gotten out of this crazy little hobby.

I do know that the decision to launch "Dime Boxes" didn't seem like a monumental one at the time -- it was something, at most, I figured I'd tinker with for a month or two after having discovered baseball card blogs earlier in 2011 (I wasn't even 100 percent sure what a blog consisted of at the time, if I'm being honest).

But now, six years later, there's little doubting the impact this blog has had on my card collection and my life as a whole. Year Five saw me come to grips with being a more sporadic blogger than I'd been in the past. But it also showed me just how much I need this blog to exist, and how much I need to write for it, however infrequently that may be. It's given me a voice I never thought I had -- or thought I wanted to have, for that matter.

Blogging has, over the span of the last six years, become as much a part of me as the cards themselves. And whether you've been here since the beginning or just discovered my blog yesterday, I thank you, the readers, for reading, commenting, and just generally being a part of the "Dime Boxes" experience. It's been a blast.

Here's to Year Six.