What Did You Do Philatelically: Today Or Recently?

Geoff, you're right, the Grande is the tallest of them all I suppose. Guess it has it's negative and positive sides / . Thank you for the suggestion with the Davo stick-on holders, but I am done with stickers etc peeling off by themselves. Anyway I have already received 60 of those Grande Classic Signum albums from Nordfrim - and another batch of 60 is on order ...so I have set my path forward with regards to album of choice. After all, spending a few hours to modify some shelves is an insignificant task compared to transferring the contents of the albums

With regards to the Grande Vario pages - I absolutely love them! Lots of space - and 210 mm wide pockets that can house much more per line than in regular stockbooks, and allow more 'air' than the regular Vario pages. So bottom line is that I am very pleased.

The Folio and the Kanzlei are even bigger! I probably couldn't lift those. Good luck with the transfer!

- thanks, this will take years.... However the goal is not the destination, but the journey itself.

Start collecting Ireland not long ago. Like the stamps, like the country. Learn something everyday. Daniel

I wrote my first philatelic article for the current TSF Newsletter

Finished layouts on my French Morocco pages, now working on Independent Morocco

Today was quite the epic and harrowing philatelic adventure. The "Spring" stamp show was held today in Quechee, Vermont. I put "Spring" in quotes, because spring it was not. It was more like a Jack London novel. I was informed via email the previous night that the show was not cancelled and it was a go. At my home 2 1/2 hours to the south it was just rain. I was just rain 6am this morning when I left. I crossed the border from New York to Vermont and into Bennington and north on rt 7. The roads were a bit slushy - Vermont doesn't believe in salting the roads as much as New York. It was a mix of rain, snow and sleet up through Manchester and was getting worse as ventured northward. I was thinking of turning around, but then a Volkswagon Golf passed my Subaru. I figured if that car can do it so can I. As I approached Rutland the roads actually were better - they use salt. That lured my into false sense of security. From Rutland it's rt. 4 eastward and by Killington it was pretty bad, but I still had tracks to follow in the snow. For you mid-westerners, rt. 4 is no easy stretch of road, but a winding, twisting 2 lane special through the Green Mountains and down through a curvy river valley as if the road was designed by a demonic 6-year old with a Hot Wheels track. I kept the car steady through it all and made it to Woodstock, Vermont. A quaint little Norman Rockwell-like town especially buried under a couple of feet of snow. A dozen or so miles afterwards I made it to the school in Queeche where the bi-annual show is held. The road off of rt.4 was barely plowed, but a Subaru is a trooper and made it and even luckier the parking lot was plowed. To my surprise there were actually other cars! The show was going to happen after all. Well...6-7 dealers dropped out including the five main cover dealers I was hoping to see. I don't blame them. Two other dealers had a $1 box which was the saving grace, but it was slim pickings overall. I did find some 1950's era Swiss FDCs with full semi-postal and BOB sets along with some other odds and ends. I was only at the show for about an hour or so, but not to be disappointed just a mile or two down the road is a large antique mall. I found a large amount of postcards for $1 each and spent four hours going though them. I only found 26 postcards, but 7 of those are "Dear Doctor" cards. I also found a small lot of early German and Swiss poster labels. At least by the time I left the antique mall it had warmed up and V-DOT salted the roads. The things we do to fulfil the philatelic itch and the silver lining - no competition.

@DJCMHOH -I am sure your pages are getting great - however I'm unable to find the link to your stampblog - care to share?

I've finally completed Luxembourg, slow progress. Now I'm working on upgrading my Inventory database (Excel), to generate better and more detailed 'Summary Reports', trends etc - and also generate improved tags/placeholders for my Vario pages. Lots of cool statistics can easily be pulled from such a detailed inventory. Like the fact that the value of all Luxembourgs stamps issued 1940-1999 is contributing to less than 5% of the total value of all issues since 1852-1999. And the stamps issued in 1875 alone contributes to 45% of the same total value, and is thus worth more than 9 times the value of all stamps 1940-99.

The weather here in NC was great although a bit windy. I did skim the latest AP and some stamps from Century arrived. I spent more time on detailing my car and mowing the yard for the first time.

I have also been organising.
In a way, I have two hobbies...Philately (collecting Ireland) and Stamp Collecting (collecting the world).
One drives me insane and the other drives me back to sanity.
And for a few years I have been keeping some balance by having these two hobbies run side by side.
My collection is "unbalanced". Having bought packets of some countries and various topicals in the 1960s and liking to add one stamp from newly independent countries, there was no real "need" to buy the world.
So after 45 years, I have just 15,500 non-Irish stamps and that seems very low. So I have set out targets for 31st December 2017....spreadsheets showing the number from each country and how many I would like to have in nine months.
And I have been working on albums....its amazing how much the world has changed. And how the information gleaned from albums five decades ago is now obsolete. So updating stuff like capital cities on the worlds nations with new information on the UN Members and seven or eight other nations. And curently printing out a cover "album" page for every one. A book (aimed at children) with stickers of every national flag is a big help.
I suppose it has been a lesson in just how much the world has been evolving. And Stamp Collecting has to evolve also.

Completed my collection? No, but finally have finished the last of the 80 collages that decorate the front and back covers of the 40 loose-leaf binders that hold my "Gazetteer Collection". I've attached one of them to this post (2 inches on the left have been cut off here because my scanner bed isn't as wide as the collage).
My Gazetteer Collection is the 68,000+-at-the-moment stamps with readable/identifiable postmarks of the worldwide cities/towns/etc. where they were canceled. They're mounted in 40 Avery Dennison loose-leaf binders that all have a clear pocket on the front and back covers. Hated to see all that space going to waste, so I have been making collages of stamps, seals, philatelic, postal and personal stuff to decorate each album cover.
The stamps I've put in these collages are almost all damaged so it's been no philatelic loss to affix them to these collages. The example I've attached is for the cover of the binder that holds all the Czechoslovakia and Czech Rep. postmarks. I visited the Alfons Mucha museum in Prague and so I used souvenirs of that visit as the theme of this collage. Mucha designed several of Czechoslovakia's earliest issues and so I scanned and printed some for the cover. Great fun for me, as I have made several collages, too, as part of my avocation as an artist.
Will the Gazetteer Collection itself ever be finished? I doubt it!

Blaamand, its http://djcmhphilately2.blogspot.com/

EdziuMM - Great frontcover - I would love to see the contents!

DJCMHOH - thanks, really nice work Gene!

Placed all of my Berlin Steiner pages and mounted covers in page protectors. Took about an hours, but I got to listen to the S-Town podcast while doing it.

S-Town podcast?