Overcome by Events

I haven't been posting very regularly, either here or at my other blog, Old Patriot's Pen. There have just been too many things to do, and not enough time available to do them.

I've been buying stamps pretty regularly over the last six months, and now I'm up to my eyeballs in them. I picked up a dozen or so lots just last week, and haven't even begun to get them all cleaned up and cared for. Some of them are single items (Croatia B40, for instance), while others are stock pages, stock cards, album pages, and small accumulations, up to two pound-plus boxes of stamps on paper I have barely looked at. Several lots from this selection and a few previous ones I purchased have forced me to add a "bulk trades" page to my list gateway trading document. These are stamps I have in excess of the 10 of each I keep for trading. Some of these catalogue up to $10 each, but most are in the 20c to $1 range. I may have anywhere from five (the minimum I require to list) to over 200 copies of each stamp. I've only got about 100 stamps listed so far, out of several thousand I need to list.

I also need to get back to working on building my inventory. I use Quattro Pro, a Corel spreadsheet, because that's what I had first, and what I found worked the best for what I was trying to do. I've created listings for about 120 of over 885 separate stamp-issuing entities so far, including several large nations. Each nation takes over two hours to build, and includes everything listed in Scott, Michel, Stanley Gibbons, Minkus, or any other catalog I have. My final product is a complete inventory of what I have, what I don't have, the catalog value of that particular portion of my collection, and what I have for trade. It also takes considerable time to keep updated - something I've been lax in doing.

Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations have also kept me pretty busy. Things will become more peaceful and less hectic after the first of the new year - I hope!