Stamp Fatigue

​I said recently I would talk about stamps and I ended up talking about old stuff in general.  Well this time I really am going to talk about stamps.  I am determined.  It is going to happen.  Comes a time and now’s the time.  Time for what?  Oh yes, stamps.
I have just got back into them.  Well maybe I should say I was not touching them as I was letting them mature.  Actually, some of them are very mature already. Like over one hundred years old mature.  Like from countries that no longer exist mature.
I had been intimidated.  I had a tin full of world stamps.  Some of them were very very old.  They needed sorting.  I hit upon what I thought was a good idea.  I would divide the stamps into bags of one hundred.  I thought, “I can do one hundred at a time.”  The problem ended up being not as bad as I thought.  It was worse.  There were over 6,900 stamps.  Still moving something from one place to another looks like I have done something.
I work six days a week and have the seventh off.  It sounds really spiritual, but I cannot work seven days in a row on the same thing.  I have tried.  It is like I do two half days work.  Does my head in.  I have over 11 weeks or almost three months work just to sort them. If I do 100 a day.
I made a mistake yesterday.  I looked.  When I did not know how much I had to do, I was blissfully ignorant.  I have other pages and pages of world stamps that I want to integrate.  They will need sorting too.  Then arranging.  Then displaying.
I reckon I have the equivalent of several months full time work to complete the tasks.  I have already spent hundreds of hours getting to where I am.
 I actually love it.  I tend to examine the history of places as I sort the stamps.  Some stamps though are hard to place.  They have only Chinese looking writing, but they can be from a number of Asian countries.  I check references to find out where some are from.
Other countries present problems of their own.  Hungarian stamps for example are Magyar.  I just went to my cupboard to check the spelling of Magyar and saw a few other boxes.  I did not make the mistake of looking in them.  I don’t want to know right now.  There will come a day when I will, but today is not that day.
Actually sorting stamps would have been a perfect lockdown activity.  Too late now though.  Besides, we did other things and are happy with what we did.  Also, no matter where I roam in the world…oh the borders are shut.  No matter where I roam in Australia….hmmm ditto.  No matter where I roam in Queensland I know the stamps are waiting for me.  And I am no longer intimidated.  Maybe gob smacked or flabbergasted or overwhelmed or stunned.  But not intimidated.
I tell myself I have been here before.  It will be done, and at least I will think it looks pretty smick.