Ick + Philately

It's so humid that I've worked up a sweat while fiddling with my stamp collection. Which is going swimmingly, btw, and which is also how I feel about sitting in this humidity. Ha!

I need more stock sheets, though; I don't use the little gummy flaps to hinge 'em into books, I use the ones with rows of plastic you snug them into. I've got tons of stamps sorted into the cute little glassine envelopes, with nowhere to go.

I just got in a bunch of stamps for really cheap (like $8) recently, which were awesome, because they came from a book gotten at an estate sale. Inheriting someone else's stamps is fun, and they might have some rarer ones. Online (ebay and stampwants are the biggest sites, I think) you can get all kinds of stuff, but most often the auctions/sales are for individual stamps or series, with their catalog numbers listed, etc. I like getting a mass of stamps and discovering different stuff. The other stamp purchase I made recently is for 1000 worldwide (this usually means no American or English stamps), and a pack of 25 stamps from Malawi and 50 from Mexico. I mostly got those because they were from the same vendor and were dirt cheap/postage-free. But I'm collecting Malawian stamps in particular, for nostalgic purposes: I spent a semester at Chancellor College in Malawi my junior year at Colby College.

Otherwise I've got stuff from just about every country around, including from some that aren't around anymore. I've got a ton of American and Russian stamps, though, the former out of an interest in my country's history, and the latter because they're kewl. Actually, I can list off a bunch of countries w/bitchin' stamp designs, so I'm still just grabbing any old stamps in general, although this (with the above exception) is being curtailed a fair bit for lack of funds.

I almost made it to an estate sale recently where the guy told me there'd be stamps, but it was too far away. Eh! I'll keep hunting. Estate sales are a gas, btw, and if you've never been to one, you should check it out. People go fucking nuts.

Eulogy for Spot

I recently had to fill in my friend JennyLisa about my previous kitty, Spot. I did so w/these words, elsewhere:

Poor little sweet Spot never returned one day. I stalked the neighborhood for a number of days, did the whole poster thing, but nothing. I'm hoping that he got lost and someone took him in, rather than getting run over. Such is the risk of having an outdoor kitty.

I really miss the guy, he was such a riot. I like to imagine him traveling around the world: dining fine dining in Paris, prowling castle ruins in England, investigating Berlin's catacombs, finding secret passages (yay D'n'D!) in Egyptian pyramids, warning children away from IEDs in Iraq, carrying medical supplies to inaccessible areas in Malawi, searching for woolly mammoths in Russia, fighting for workers' rights in China, hunting giant rats in Indonesia, going on a vision quest with the Kiwis, guest-illustrating a manga graphic novel in Tokyo, climbing to the edge of volcanoes in Hawaii, advising Chavez in Venezuela, leading Mexicans across the border, trying his hand at goalie in Canada, and maybe, just maybe, visiting me before he makes a full frontal assault on the White House.

In any event, to me, Spot is a martyr in the struggle for fun and the absurd.

BTW - anyone that likes to look at pictures of precious little kittens can do so in my new photo album, yawp.