Well, I've finally got almost all of the stamps soaked (5 hour session). I think that's all of them, anyway, barring the ones on postcards. They'll take the steaming kettle to do. Not something I'm looking forwards to.

Now all that's left to do is get them into the albums, and that will be that corner cleared up after over a year of stamps in yogurt cartons, margarine tubs and even an ice-cream bucket of stamps. Not that it will be done anytime soon. Still, I've probably hit the half-way point in re-organizing my stamp collection.

My tags had gotten out of control so I've spent the last few hours going back and tagging everything from the very first entry onwards. This allowed me to deal with duplicate tags, which should reduce things somewhat. In the process I came up with the following comments and thoughts relating to things I've previously posted in my journal.

The most frequently used tags here are 'website update' and 'life', often used in combination.

I've had Rome: Total War for over two years and have yet to beat it.

Two years later, Gladiator is still one of my favourite movies. As is it's soundtrack, one of only a few I listen to.

The number of typos in my entries. And I never noticed them until now. I'm not fixing them though.

The stamps from that bucket two years ago have yet to be fully dealt with, much less the reorganization that I thought to start. I've since learned that the photo album pages were actually damaging the stamps. Now I'm in the process of moving them to new albums. Proper stamp ones this time, and I'm trying to organize them by set and in chronological order. This has been going since fall 2005. And, I've been buying more stamps. Every time I think I've got them sorted for one country or another, I end up getting more and have to start all over again.

The yard work situation has not changed any, except that I've more or less given up.

Since the EzBoard disaster and the switch to my own messageboard, the number of posts have gone down (from miniscule to none) and the spam has gone up. On the other hand, there's no advertising and my messageboard follows the layout of the website now.

I've noticed how may times I mention an idea I have/had for fanfic and it never gets written. Some of them have been completely forgotten and some of them are still floating around in my head. Whether they'll eventually get written or not, I don't know. As for the Tolkien essay on Divine Interference, it's still waiting to be written.

I just ran across a mention of a sequel to my fic Valentines Surprise. Sequel? What sequel? I have no idea what I was planning for it now.

First Man in Rome did not end up on the May 2006 list as I had predicted it would. Instead it languished until this month. It will be on the April 2007 list, almost a year after I'd planned on reading it.

Its been over 6 months since I got the fic site going, and I still haven't uploaded all my fic to it. This is atrocious. The main stories left are the Feet series and the arda100 prompts, which I really should try harder to write.

Not one of my New Years resolutions has been done yet.

On another topic, the website switch is going well, though slowly. I've got the characters through to F, the Books, and the Quotes partially done (all of The Hobbit and part of the LOTR) into the database. However, I have yet to figure out how it is going to be re-formed into HTML. I think a particularly computer savvy friend of mine is going to have to help. Anyway, I get part of this done each day. Might take more than the forecasted month though.

Or space. I have too many hobbies. Watercolour painting, webpage design, cross stitch, calligraphy, illuminated lettering, drawing, stamp collecting, beadwork,etc. I've just added spinning (drop spindle so far, and I'm debating about trying weaving (got to do something with the results from the spinning LOL).

95% of the time, I can find what I need for a particular hobby. Today I can't. I'm looking for the brushes, pen and ink. I've got the paint and everything else out, but can't find that.
ETA: Found the brushes in a chronological puzzle. The bottom of a box of stamp stuff that I haven't touched since April, but I used the brushes about two months ago and I don't remember putting them in that box.

It's not the hobbies that are the problem, its the space for the supplies and reference books. I have four of the shallow plastic tubs filling the space under my bed and they are all for craft stuff. Two of them are for drawing/painting (one for books and sketchpads and the other for the materials. I separated them after an incident with the india ink), and the other two, well one is full of cross stitch patterns and kits and the other has some stuff for painting with acrylics. Bead stuff is scattered throughout the house. The pliers and tools are in the misc. drawer, the beads are split between the TV stand and the basement (thanks to a beaded and sequined skirt I have to keep mending). I've got two trays of stamps out on the basement sofa as well that need to be sorted and catalogued. Where am I going to put the stuff for the new hobby? Especially if I get a spinning wheel (I've been offered one).

I finally figured out what a watermark is in stamp terminology.

Well, ten years or so ago, I collected stamps. I lost interest for a while, but some people kept giving me stamps. Over the weekend, I got an ice-cream bucket's worth (the 4 litre size). That gave me the kickstart to go back to the collection. Right now, I'm fairly enthusiastic with the project and two rooms of the house have been taken over by it. We'll see how long that lasts.

The old collection was rather out of order. The labels were done at various times in various styles and sizes. So, the first thing I've been doing is making all new labels. All well and good, until I've printed them only to discover that I'm missing about a quarter of the categories and Word (I can think of a few words for it) mucked up some of the others. This is where the computer problems come in (more about that farther down).

So, it turns out that I have a fairly nice collection, and I discovered a whole bunch of stamps from the 40's and 50's. All well and good. So I started sorting them. Fine. Now I need more pages to put them in.

Guess what! Photo album pages in the size of a standard 3 ring binder are nearly impossible to find. I'd had an empty album but the pages didn't stick properly, so I went to get some new pages. I ended up getting a whole new album of a different size. So, now I'm trying to sort the stamps and shift some of the categories to the new album, which means moving each stamp to the new pages. I have to do this because I don't want to break up some of the larger countries into two separate places.

All this is going fine until last night. I went to print the missing lables and the other computer crashed. Nothing big, you think normally. This time I got told that a system file was corrupted and it couldn't restart. I spent a couple of hours last night on the phone to fix it. That got fixed, and now there is a password error of some sort. Hopefully I can get that fixed today. And no, I don't consider wiping the hard drive and re-installing everything to be a fix.