What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Finally dove into the pile of Machins I've had in a box.

Seven day tour of Ireland. Visited and photographed 39 post offices.
Also was in the Michael Collins Museum in County Cork on the day that the centenary stamp was issued. Literally a few steps from the post office so some nice postcards and covers with first day cancelations.

I had a similar issue and believe it is really related to lack of experience in gleaning the watermarks from all the other "noise" aspects (designs, cancellations, hinge marks) used by all the countries so not much experience with any except a few British Commonwealth.

I purchased a Sherlock watermark detector ($$$) since it does not use fluid and gives one unlimited viewing time (battery life) but it is not total replacement for fluid.

Made up 3-orders for stamps & FDCs from 3-different vendors, USPS Stamp Fulfillment Center, Buck-a-Cover & Discount Cover. Bit the bullet & decided to get the separate FDCs for American Wildlife issued at CAPEX. Was able to get 49 of the 50 designs from 1-vendor, and needed to seek the 50th from a second vendor. (Seems like that's how it goes for me, always one short, even at the $1 box at shows, always 1-short of multi-design issue).

Greece was the topic of the past two days. I worked through a dozen or so glassines that hadn't yet been cataloged. Found a few to add to my existing Steiner pages and one from Thrace as well. The larger effort was dealing with the occupation stamps. I hadn't previously mounted any of them and I got reminded why. The 2012 standard and 2019 classic catalogs are very different in the Greece occupation area. Seems that Scott decided to renumber some things in recent years. Steiner pages that I have don't match the classic in some areas, so I needed to rework a bunch of pages. My stack of unmounted pages is near 100 again, so need to take care of that this week.

Steiner has classic pages and worldwide pages. I have noticed occassionally the classic pages have differed in layout but not sure if intentional so pays to look at both sets of pages. In the early days some pages followed other catalogs.

I finished mounting and scanning Cambodia additions.

Yes, I always look at both. In this case, neither matched the 2019 classic. It's not a big deal, just happens sometimes.

Today's project was more Yemen. Added 21 pages and 86 stamps. Restructured four space research Steiner pages in Yemen Arab Republic and had to create one for Yemen Kingdom that wasn't in the set I have.

I have always wanted to mount my collection of airplanes stamps but I would always push them to the side. Well I have started finally working on them. I am cataloging them by continent. Can't wait to see them all together instead of being in boxes.

Finished mounting 486 stamps across the 110 pages I had stacked. Seventy of the pages are newly added to my Steiner set. Pondering what to do next. Perhaps it's time for South America.

One of these days I have to go sub to Steiner again, stupid me, I managed to download a section of Taiwan pages instead of PRC so I've got a big hole in the middle of my collection that's been languishing in a stock book.

Nothing too ambitious (486 stamps to mount - more power to you Nicholas!) simply got a few grab bags of stamps from very late 1920's to 1980's (nothing particularly of great value but fun to search to see how far along I can get completing series) and then received my order of all the low denomination beneficial insect sheets of 50 from Canada Post along with a nice block of 4 of the Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee commemorative as well as three Souvenir sheets from the CAPEX show.

I highly recommend getting the sheets of Beneficial Insects -- especially great for the topical or new collector. The patterns made from the individual stamps is quite beautiful and the stamps themselves are well-designed --- plus it was cheap!

Mounting a variety of new purchases to my SG Windsor Vol 1 and 2 albums, in particular boosting the collection in the Victoria, Edward VII, and George V eras.

I've been mounting my new stamps in their respective albums. I set up an ebay account to sell duplicate stamps and have been doing well with that.
I keep looking at my kilowatt box, and then I get anxious :P

Started on South America. Sorted and catalogued Chile and Colombia that I had in glassines. Found a bunch of Ecuador mixed in so I filed those in my Ecuador box.

Just for fun, I re-imagined the first page and a half of Chile from Big Blue. Scans below:





Not sure I will keep going with this project or just use the Steiner pages. The pro is fewer empty spaces and less pages. The con is that this is time consuming.