Neglect continues...80 work weeks have changed into 80-hour work weeks with a different job alignment but still so little time. Here are two pictures from a month or two back -- in one day, I discovered both of these among my daughter's things from school.

Japanese New Years' stamps

Yet another type of series for collectors - these are usually used only on special "nengajou", kind of postcards that people send out with new years' greetings on them.

sarawak stamps

Where is Sarawak? I have never been there, but it has come to me.

In the last post, I lamented about a collector who had pasted her stamps onto the pages of a spiral notebook, rendering over half of them unretrievable. I am still working on those, nearing the end at last. That's a problem: once I start, I can't finish.

So I have duly soaked, peeled, dried, and pressed hundreds of US stamps from the 1950s to 1970s. Sorting them by denomination this morning, I came across one from Sarawak. This was a new one for me but quick internet searching filled me in. What a time / place that must have been. You could go and resolve a dispute between the government and the governed and be awarded a huge chunk of land that stayed in your family for three generations -- except for four years of Japanese occupation during the war. I don't know the natives' perspective on it all, but the family claims to have respected the native traditions in the area, apart from headhunting, which was banned.

Changing the Past

Do you ever wish you could change the past? Like take back a careless word spoken, or one rash decision that led to a bad outcome? I think we all know that feeling.

Do you ever wish you could change or take back the words or actions of others?? I think we all know this feeling, too.

I made a very fortunate purchase at an auction some time ago. Not a stamp auction, but a home auction, selling off everything inside a house. Near the end of many auctions, after the early boxes and the big-money items, there are usually boxes of leftovers that go really cheap. Sometimes they just start throwing boxes together for a dollar, just to finish the sale.

Actually it was my father, not me. He had noticed some stamps in a box – just piles of cancelled stuff, nothing apparently valuable, just thrown in a box with no organization. Under my earlier instructions, he made a low bid for it and got it. Once home, the treasures were revealed – many complete sheets of stamps, perfect for the collection. There were also many plate blocks but, sadly, they had been stored together in a stacked position and were stuck together.

Some were OK. On someone’s advice, I put the others in the freezer and was later able to salvage a few more without damage. The rest remain in the freezer. Indeed, I wish I could have had that former collector separate each sheet and plate block with plastic wrap, in plasticine, anything.

But I felt the above feeling, that wish that I could undo certain choices of others, more keenly with one strange notebook. Some young woman in small-town Nebraska had taken to collecting stamps and she had a good range of US and world from the 1950s. Unfortunately, she glued or pasted most of them on the pages of a spiral notebook. That’s what I really wish I could change.

I took out a random page and tried to soak them off. Absolutely no luck. I was disappointed but tried again a couple days later. Success – or partial success. Maybe she used a different type of glue or paste. Anyway, many of them fell off the page with a light shake. Most of the rest I could easily soak off, and I lost a few to thinning.

I am doing a page or two a day right now. So far, they have all been in the middle of the two above patterns – none fall off easily, most come off with soaking but have some glue / paste left on the back of the stamp. Maybe not even worth my effort, but I don’t like to quit things once I have started.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and talk to that young woman, praise her enthusiasm for collecting, but ask her to store them better.

She could never imagine that I would end up with her stamps. I wonder who will end up with mine??

movies

Did a little stamp trading on Saturday, learned a lot about how to better organize my collection. Heard one other thing which perplexed me: my stamp friend watches movies while he works on his collection. My immediate reaction was that I cannot do that - when I watch a movie, I want to give it my full attention. And when I work on stamps, I give them my full attention.

That night, I sat down in the living room to do some long-neglected work on my collection. As luck would have it, my family started watching a movie (yes, I should have done it in my room). Forrest Gump. It had been a long while since I had seen it and I found myself watching portions of it, then doing stamps, and so on, back and forth.

Might have to try that again.

... and hello USA

Happy New Year from Kansas. We shipped almost 130 boxes by sea and landed safely in Kansas. I have already gone to a meeting of the local stamp club and it was quite nice.

More importantly I set up my first trade - a lot of my Japanese duplicate stamps for Chinese and Taiwanese stamps. Strange but good setting, an old family style bakery four times as big as any donut shop in Japan. We two stamp traders were the only customers until the local yakkers came in, eyeing the stamp action from afar as they drank coffee and talked about the weather and football.

Anyway, my stamp world has expanded rapidly and it looks like much more to come.