What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Clive, thank you for the referral to the Album easy video, I will watch it today.

Curiously, I never thought of my back when I took up stamp collecting at age 8 - and only noticed the affects it seems to have in the last few years, but maybe they are cumulative.

I was a day away from having fusion back surgery after three weeks of agony when suddenly the symptoms went away - I had four herniated disks so they weren't cured, but have managed for the last seven years to get by being cautious and using Salon Pas as needed, like today.

My doctor, on my request for surgery was " It's an age thing, deal with it"
I am going to persevere. The "back swing" is my saviour, but you never know when it is about to strike.
I find leaning over stamps tables, at bourses brings it on.

Sometimes I feel like standing upright was a not a good idea for the species.

Keeping your core strong does wonders for your back. Exercise no matter what obstacles you face. Keep moving if humanly possible.

My doctor, on my request for surgery was " It's an age thing, deal with it"

@ Rod, you and I must have the same doctor (-:


Peter

Yesterday, I started filling a duplicate US album I had sitting on a pile of duplicate stuff. The album had 1938ish to 1980 mint but nothing else. Well, it had a bunch of mounts in it. I have now filled the pre 1938 with many used stamps from various other stuff in the duplicate pile. It was a good feeling to be filling spaces. I guess that really is one of my joys of collecting.

I am going to post something similar to this on the soaking topic.

I successfully used the suggestion to use the flat part of my tongs rubbed circularly on the hinge remnants I wanted to remove until the heat helped the hing start to peel. It worked on 5 out of the 6 stamps I tried it on. No more remnant, no damage caused to the stamp, and much nicer looking than it had been before the operation.

As long as I have been collecting, never heard of this method but it gives me lots of philatelic activity for the future.

BobbyT

Added various miscellaneous stamps to my Hungary collection, from postage to airmail to postage due. What was represented to me as a Scott P1 (newspaper stamp) has thick paper, almost postcard-like, compared to the thin paper of the other newspaper stamps - cut postal stationery, perhaps? Not sure - Scott is no help and I'm still working my way through understanding the format of my recently-purchased Hungarian language catalogue, which includes stationery.

Last night, I recatalogued my classic stamps from Albania and Algeria, printed new pages, and laid the stamps out on the pages.

Today, I cut individual mounts and mounted 440 stamps, 147 for Albania, 104 for Algeria, 41 for Andorra, and 148 for Angola. It was a long day.

Azores and Bahamas are next.

Yesterday went to the first 'live' club auction in about a year.

Didn't buy much at all as the prices people were paying were ridiculous. Some of the items could have been bought cheaper on eBay.

It was nice to get out of the house and actually look at some stamps.

Looking forward to going to more of the club auctions in the future.

Since last Sunday, I removed and sorted through classic Azores, Bahamas, Barbados, and Bermuda, preparing for remounting on new pages. However, Austria was calling me and I got into doing that instead. I removed the 21 pages worth from the old International Part 1, sorted, soaked off hinges and paper remnants as needed, and then remounted on new pages. All in all this was about 800 stamps, though a few parallel pages were done. If I have 50 percent of both unused and used for a particular set (or page), I'll do one of each as this saves me storing them back into glassines.

It seemed like an easy enough project to start with but by noon I had most of my collection out and spread around my huge dining room table, including several of the chairs.

I wanted to put together some "all different country glassine packets" for trade here.

When I got to Hungary, I began to appreciate the extent of my collection realizing I have duplicates for many of the stamps, but triples and more. So I spread out five albums to make sure the ones which go into the packets are truly "homeless" - don't have a spot in any of the four I keep for Hungary. The fifth album I knew was all dups, but I forgot home many.

I didn't get that far, but as of now have one packet of 150 different and another of 40 different. I will keep working on it.

I also kept working at trying to figure out how to upload photos and scans to this site. I took apart one of my albums to get better scans of a few pages than the photos which I had taken. Now if I can just figure out how to keep the files, jpeg, and small enough, I might be there.

Also using the glassine interleaving I recently obtained to make my Scott Volume 1s easier to look at since the pages face each other.

BobbyT

If image file size is an issue, you can use the image size optimizer. In some cases, you may want to keep image size as you want then use the image optimizer for posting.

https://www.stampcommunity.org/image-optimizer/

Sorted through some stamps of Australia, got bored and bought a bounce of FDCs from various places.

Well, because I did Austria last week, I figured to start on Hungary. Primary reason being my Hungary glassines were not well organized. I removed 1941-1959 from the old pages. I sorted and recatalogued all stamps, including the classics which were already in glassines. I printed new pages through 1949, at least a dozen parallel pages, and created pages for the Three-Hole punch varieties of several issues. Stamps are laid out and ready to mount. Gonna take a while because it's got to be 1000+ stamps.

Monday - cut & mounted 137 stamps

Last night I used AlbumEasy to work up a supplementary page to intercalate in my album for an AEF booklet pane (Sc. 498f) I picked up in a Kelleher sale this month.

Entailed spending some pleasant moments poking more deeply into this item as well as fiddling with the PAGE_COLUMN command to get the spacing right so the booklet pane would fit. Pretty happy to have this in the album.