With my Saturday classes regularly being cancelled at the last minute, that has become my day to be fairly lazy and homebound. For the third Saturday, I did not venture outside of my home other than to walk to the local mini-mart to buy some food and drink. On each of these days off, I have still awoken very early and have plunged right into “stamp-work,” that is to say that I have been adding stamps from my collection into “Big Blue” — my worldwide stamp album covering the first century of philately, 1840-1940.

Since obtaining the album in mid-January, I have methodically added the stamps page by page. In this volume, the United States and its possessions comes first with the first “A” country being Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Taking this alphabetical approach, I am currently up to Chile. However, on this particular day I decided to tackle the Thailand pages as I have the stamps scattered in many different stock books. I also have heavy duplication (extra copies) of many of the early stamps. This album is old enough that it predates the first stamp inscribed with the new national name of “Thailand”, so these are actually all Siam pages. In all, I mounted some 70 Siamese stamps today. I still have many for which the album does not provide a space for. I think I may print pages for a comprehensive Thailand album separate from this worldwide tome but that will be a year or more in the future. I have plenty of stamps right now to keep me occupied.

Today’s featured photo shows the first page of Siam in my album, plus the stock page where a lot of the stamps were storied awaiting placement. It is always a good feeling when so much of a first page for any given territory can be filled from items already existing in my collection. A few more shots of the succeeding pages are below.

As I mentioned, when I have the day off my Saturday mornings are largely given over to stamps. This week, I began around 6:30 in the morning as it is still relatively cool (we are approaching the hottest period of the year). Later in the day, I did some household chores (mainly laundry and cleaning), a fair amount of reading (currently plowing through Bill Bryson’s The Body), and I wrote one of three different final exams for the rapidly approaching end of the school year. Unfortunately, the internet service in my part of the island was completely non-existent for most of the afternoon and I gave up trying to upload images around 11 pm. It’s a bit better tonight (Sunday) which is why this post is a day late.