What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Ordered a big lot of stamps from a dealer friend that is retiring a number of weeks ago. They got completely flooded with sales and it has taken them weeks to get things packaged and sent out. Just got the tracking number of the order yesterday, coming across the country. We'll see how long it takes.

Just got the stamps. Tracking is entirely useless. I checked today before they showed up and the only thing it said was "in transit". It could have been on Mars for all anyone knows.

Attended WALPEX today, sore feet, thin wallet, very successful day.

Mounted about 325 stamps from Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia on fresh Steiner pages. These are for years 1956 to 1959 and are the first non-US stamps I have mounted in almost a year. Feels good to be mounting again.

I purchased this attractive cover at the Houston Stamp Show yesterday. I loved it's franking and having the 2 Hawaii stamps on it. Interesting history on this Zeppelin flight.
The LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin completed its historic round-the-world flight on August 29, 1929, landing back at Lakehurst, New Jersey, after departing from the same location 21 days earlier on August 8.

Great cover, wow. Highly exhibitable. I especially like how the "face-free" cancel on the C6, 620, and 649 encircle the design and leave the vignette clear to see. The patience that the clerk must have had to neatly cancel each stamp so cleanly. Pretty.

Here's one for the record books... I bought an FDC from Costa Rica on August 25th, 2023, and it was shipped to me a few days later on September 3rd, 2023 (the envelope it was in was clearly postmarked). I just got it in the mail today. It took over two years to get to me (about 26 months). To be honest I had forgotten it and had no idea where it came from until I looked at old auctions that I had won!

@Hawaiianbrian: Wow, what a neat cover!

In the last two weeks, I've transferred my Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, and Kenya collections to Steiner pages.

It's amazing sometimes how a seemingly simple change in presentation can enhance one's appreciation of stamps. I never really took notice of the beauty of my early Japanese stamps until I moved them from glassine envelopes and crowded Harris Statesman pages onto Steiner pages. I just might build on my early Japan collection once I start acquiring stamps again.

Trying to make sense of early France this evening! I'm definitely no expert. Will see if I can catalogue all these.

Nothing too ambitious just some small buys:

The last US "airmails" issued by the post office between 1999- 2012, C133 - C150. Beautiful photography on those stamps and well-designed so happy with them.

Got No Nuke stamps and a Peace set of embrodiered stamps from United Nations plas a triple canceled FDC.

A nice 10 GBP FDC and some fun grabbags of US stamps (about 1880 - 1980).

Really need to cut back on expenses so one method I will employ is waiting longer to buy and attain a better idea of what is out there with new issues.

I am in the planning stage of migrating a Philippine / US period to new pages. This collection was on the old thin Minkus pages so pages are rather flimsy. Minkus sure did cram them on a page. The negative is when the stamps boxes are joined it can look messing if mounts do not align. The punch holes tear easily when large blocks are on the,.

I have not decided on whether I will use Steiner or custom pages that would be similar to Steiner but need to add spaces for booklet panes and specimens.

Nice US Philippines, Angore

I have not yet concentrated on this area. So, I am missing all the high values and sets are mixed mint and used.

Identifying Puerto Rico

ANGORE ---- Did the same thing about 2 weeks ago with some new stuff for Puerto Rico .

I have finally, after decades of work, assembled a mostly complete set of album pages (Scott plus Steiner) for all the countries in the world.

Now I'm going through the decades of backlogged stamps I have accumulated and continuing to fill all those blank spaces at a rapid rate. Along the way, I'm correcting errors in the printed pages and adding pages for souvenir sheets and other stamps not included in the printed Scott pages.

Right now, I'm in the midst of Finland, working my way through the world mostly in alpha order.

Pure pleasure, after years of delayed gratification.