What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

For a while, I had a set of Scott albums for South America. It was here, perhaps, that its separation of airmail issues created maximum irritation. Stamps from one set, scores of pages apart. Ditto Steiner, with worse layout.

GeoffHa ---Understand your frustration ,I have that in reverse when moving stamps from S.G. or Minkus album pages .

I grew up with that separation, to me it is normal .
The reason for that goes back over 100 years ago when airmail stamps here had their own albums and a separate catalogs . In Chicago,I attended a few meetings at the Jack Knight Stamp Club which most members only collected airmail stamps .

Speaking of transitioning between various formats in my case page sorting. I'm finally finishing up moving into my new (to me) Nationals. It was more complicated then it needed to be because I had pulled all definitive pages sorted by coil, booklet, self adhesive into a different binder.

I fought if I actually liked it that way or not so for now I left the new albums alone with what I guess is the factory sorting.

Its weird abandoning my original albums since I've been toting them around for roughly 40 years!
Don't get me wrong I'm glad I made the change; the old pages were hand me downs of hand me downs with some staining, thinning from mount damage and well worn. And I'm loving the 3 ring format. Probably a little too much....Its so easy just to pop out a page, flip back and forth between years..... What can I say.. I'm a slow adopter lol

For my U.S. collection having airmail at the "back of the book" is okay because those stamps are distinct from regular postage. I'm redoing my Colombian collection and using LibreOffice to edit the Steiner pages, (1) to format them to the 9" x 12" page size of Harris Citation albums (I print on 11" x 17" ledger paper and trim it down), and (2) to organize them .by year of issue rather than postage type. When a stamp design is used for both a regular and airmail issue they can stay together.

Last Friday, October 16, I drove from eastern Washington to the SEAPEX Bourse in the Seattle area, my first time there. I had a good time and found useful material, but I think the PIPEX show in Portland, Oregon is a better trip. Part of that is because I don't have to drive, I take Amtrak from Pasco to Portland, walk 2 blocks, and then take the light rail out to the Clackamas Town Center station. It's a 1/4 mile walk to the show hotel, but I've been told they will send their courtesy van if you call. It has exhibits, more dealers, and there are lots of nice restaurants to walk to.

Last Friday was October 9 here in the Heartland.

Good catch olddutch2. Thought I lost a week somewhere.

Still plugging away at US, it's become painfully obvious I need to (and already have) for the most part radically overhaul my acquisition strategy.

I've spent numerous hours organizing and sorting US from what seems like 30 different sources in every format you can think of into a useful process in order to put in book. So I spend the time, do my due diligence and the result is I put about 20 to 30 stamps in the book and the rest gets stored away as dupes.

Moving forward no more US that I don't need!!! Most of the stuff comes along for the ride with box lots, red boxes and what not but I need to do better. To that end I'm compiling a US need/want list and will work on eliminating the hitchhikers.

As if I needed any reinforcement to help focus my acquisition strategy. Right after I finished up my work on US today I find another 40 ish stock pages over filled with US. Mint, used covering the earlies into the 20teen range. I know its a true first world problem. I vaguely remember scanning the stuff when it arrived thinking yeah it needs gone through.

Unless something changes overnight I'm ready to work on something else and circle back to the US at a later date.

Still going through a box full of glassines with stamps. Many are butterflies so they were a topical collector. For, countries I do collect and for the areas I do collect most are stamps I already have.

I am also learning Affinity software. The latest versions merge all prior products (Publisher, Photo, and Designer) into one product. It is overkill for basic image editing but a good start. Since Microsoft has ended support for their Publisher this can do that but a lot more. It has 3 studios - Vector, Pixel, and Layout.

Yesterday I took a mangy pile of stocksheets alphabetized them and put each stack into a folder based on first letter.

Today I've been working on a mini hoard of Sweden. Broke out the earlies and have been finding a few to put in my book.