"Time and Tide..."

There's an old addage that says time and tide wait for no man. I can certainly attest to the fact that time has a habit of getting away from all of us. It's happened to me repeatedly over this past week. One of the many results is that I haven't posted to this site in eight days!

There are extenuating circumstances: Monday and Thursday mornings were tied up with medical appointments and X-rays. Wednesday afternoon was taken up by an appointment with my attorney, and Friday morning was taken up with meeting the Social Security Administrative Law judge. I worked for Shayne on Monday through Thursday, from one to four hours a day in the afternoon. Thursday evening, an old friend of mine dropped in for a short visit on his way back to Kansas from the West Coast. He left Saturday morning, and I worked Saturday afternoon.

The real reason I haven't posted, however, is that I acquired some NEW GOODIES!

Of course, all those other things are true, too. Some of them frustrated me - I wanted to work on my collection, but some things had to be done. I enjoyed the visit of my best friend. I got him started on stamp-collecting in 1974, and we've been trading back and forth ever since. He could have stayed a week and we wouldn't have run out of things to talk about. Heck, we could talk that long about stamps, and not run out of things to say! I NEEDED the x-rays - my doctor thinks I may have suffered a compression fracture of my spine, or a ruptured disk. The Social Security appointment was CRITICAL - and successful! But all those essential tasks were harder to endure because I had not one, but TWO new boxes of stamps to sort through.

I have gone through them, so I know what's inside. I've even worked several small groups of stamps up. What I mean by "working stamps up" is sorting the stamps out individually, mounting and inventorying the stamps I add to my collection, and putting the rest either into my recycle box or into my trade stock. One of the groups I've worked up entirely is Tonga.

It's not often you find a Tonga lot, especially one that contains about a hundred of the die-cut, self-adhesive freeform stamps. There were 138 in this lot, including 101 different. I've discovered through experience that you can't soak off these Tonga stamps - it's better to cut the paper away from around the stamp, and mount it like that. I also added a number of the perforated and imperforate varieties issued between 1938 and 1960 both to my collection and to my trade stock. I found several complete sets, including the 1951 50th Anniversary of British Friendship, the 1961 75th Anniversary of the postal system, and the 1953 pictorial definitives to the 5/- (shilling).







The second photo is Tonga, C7-10, foil stamps in the shape of the island of Tongatapu. I've wondered several times about how difficult it would be to use these stamps, as well as some of the gold foil stamps and the three-dimensional stamps of Bhutan, to name one country that issues them. Hand-cancelling would be essential!

I hope to write soon about the Swiss part of this purchase. It was memorable to me, and to my good friend, Mike!