What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Like a kid in a candy store. I found more Australian States: New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania packets hiding amongst my boxes and boxes of glassines. There aren't very many stamps, perhaps 10 to 20 in each area, but it's more than the 2, 0, and 1 that I had previously laid out. I had already had all my Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. Watermark identification is difficult sometimes, but I'm close to getting these done.

I also laid out Afghanistan through 1949, but it's not too exciting since I only had 2 stamps prior to the 1939-61 series. But I do have most everything from there through 1973.

This is kind of fun. I recently organized my nineteenth century covers, putting them in chronological order and into appropriate Lighthouse Vario sheets and into an attractive Lighthouse binder with a slipcase cover.

Contnuing to work my way through the alphabet, eliminating envelopes of stamps, sorted by country. Got the 2020 Scott Vol 3A, "G," from the library. Now in Germany - old, East, West, reunited, Berlin, offices in, states, etc. Probably take about 8 weeks to do, 75 - 100 hours. Sort, identify, mount needed in Scott International, hinges for lower values, Showgard mounts for higher values, 13 volumes, mount higher-value dups on pages for a CV-based trading circuit and put lower value dups in glassines for a 1-for-1 tradng circuit.

Went to a club auction on Tuesday night.

First Tuesday night auction I've been to in ages. IIRC the last time I was at a Tuesday night auction was well over a year ago and it could have been longer than that.........

Big announcement at the auction that nobody in the club has died this month and then somebody said that "The month isn't over yet.".

Oh well.

Bidding was crazy and prices were high on anything good.

I only managed to buy one lot and didn't even break a $50 bill despite having over ten items on my list. Some items could have been bought cheaper on ebay!!

Drive down took over an hour to go a little over 23 miles. Yeah, that is Melbourne traffic for you in the late afternoon. On the way home it was a lot faster and took only 40 minutes or so.

Everything seemed almost normal except for the 'sign in'. No masks or distancing required at the auction.

Remounted Ceylon through 1952. Only 112 unique stamps plus 22 parallel. Have 6 minor varieties that need pages, but not anytime soon. I did have to modify some pages to correct issues. Between that and double checking watermarks and perforations, the process took much longer than I had hoped.

I have Cameroun ready to mount and will get Chad ready, too. Some large C countries coming that I'm not looking forward to, but at least China is already done.

With Lockdown, a few ebay purchases and other online purchases such as the 2021 Irish new issues.
By 10 May, travel restrictions should be lifted and I will get to post some new issues to myself.
Things are getting better.

Working further into C, I found that Congo in my old Part 1 is actually Belgian Congo, so I'm not done with A-B. I knew that, just didn't see it because my glassines are by country as listed in the albums, not the classic catalog. Already have the stamps out and sorted, just need to print the new pages and mount them. Very attractive stamps, can't wait to see how they look when done.

Just finished going through Cuba. Printed pages through 1940 and laid out the stamps for mounting. Had to redo a couple of pages to account for missing major varieties and typos.

I'm going to do Cyprus next then start mounting the hundreds and hundreds of stamps of the C countries that have been building up.

I spent some time going through a recent purchase of some Luxembourg stamps as well as some Suriname and Israel stamps I had bought several years back. In all, I added a little over 500 stamps to my collection.

Purchased a small lot of Italian occupation of Austria on ebay that will fill some holes.

Dale

Acquired these official stamps - Saar SG S28-39 of 1 October 1949. Not the most exciting of issues, but another contribution to my French area collection.

I think they're spectacular.

Sent something back for a refund. I don't set foot in the local PO very often strangely enough.

For the last couple days I've been working my way through a mongrel Scott album I picked up on ebay recently. It's in rough shape with a mix of old Part 1 and 2 pages up to France. The seller claimed approximately 3100 stamps. I've pulled a little more than 1000 out so far. Mixed condition as expected, but it will end up filling plenty of spaces.

Dale

Just finished mounting Cameroun to 1956, Chad to 1940, Cuba to 1940, and Cyprus to QE2 coronation. That's 526 stamps all in freshly cut mounts. Now on to other countries that I laid out, but not yet mounted. This is a lot of work.

I have been mounting some modern Singapore (one of the few countries I collect after 1980) and dealing with the issue of having used stamps from multi-design strips but album spaces are for only for an entire strip.