Welcome To My New Stamp Collecting Blog!

Hello! This is my new stamp collecting blog! But, I guess you could tell that from the title. The back story? Well, a little over two months ago I had surgery on my back. So I used my recovery time to pull out my stamp collection that I hadn't touched in at least sixteen years. I've collected stamps since I was 12 years old. But there have been several very long periods of inactivity, you might even call them extended years of dormancy! But the nice thing about stamp collecting is that you can pick it back up any time you want to. It's just sitting there waiting for you.

I don't collect everything, that would be impossible! I specialize in two topics: international postage stamps issued to commemorate the Olympic Games and those issued to commemorate Space Exploration. Even those two topics are still so broad that I settle for what I can get, and what I can afford rather than try to get everything.

During my recovery period working on my stamp collection became somewhat of an obsession! I didn't realize I had so many stamps I had purchased over 16 years ago and never did anything with. So I sorted my summer Olympic Games stamps into Olympic years. Then I mounted them in Showgard Mounts, designed and printed my own stamp album pages, and researched some of the stories that fit with the stamps I had.

It was fun! And it kept me from being totally bored! But one really nice thing about this is that I may have interested my seven year old grandson, Jacob, in stamp collecting too! I showed him my collection while he was staying with us for a week during our church's Vacation Bible School. When he saw my collection he said, "Oh cool!" After which I asked him if he would like to collect stamps too. He said "Sure!"

So I pulled out my stock book of duplicate stamps, and let him pick out the ones he wanted from different countries around the world. I was also going to give him an old beginners album of mine to put them in, but he said, "Oh no Opa! I want to make my own album! Can I have one of your plain three ring binders and some blank pages?" And that was it, we were off and running! At first he stood next to my desk and sorted his stamps while I worked on mine. Then he stood right next to me as I helped him, as he made his pages for each country. Soon he crawled up on my lap as we worked on his new stamp collection together.

He took his album home, and several times I asked him if he had put any more stamps in his album. Each time he said no, and then once said, "Opa, I don't want to do it at home, that's something I want to do together with you!" Talk about tugging at a grandfather's heart strings!