Fighting a sour mood...

Nothing quite starts to sour the day like a robocall on one's cell that starts "Please hold for an important business call..." and then drops you into on-hold music. It's a minor annoyance, to be sure—cured with a flick of the thumb to disconnect the call—but it's like the first minute crack inflicted by a small pebble on a car windshield: it creates a weakness that can be exploited by subsequent assaults on one's general mood.

But that's only the case if I let it be that way, so maybe I should concentrate on letting it go.

As they cross my mind...

On our way to Fry's earlier today, we spied a couple of promising garage sales, so we stopped for a look.

And I happened to run across a stamp album, published by H. E. Harris, whose former owner stopped collecting stamps at around the time I did—or maybe a year or two later—back when I was a kid. The album was designed to hold only U.S. stamps instead of stamps from the whole world.

In my experience, collectible postage stamps are a very unusual item to see at a garage sale, because collectors attempting to sell a collection will typically turn to some other avenue to do so (e.g., eBay or a real auction house), while people who don't collect stamps seem to often be afflicted with a loathing to give up a potential "treasure" that may be hiding within a collection, or they assume that old stamps are by definition valuable, or they've glanced at a stamp catalog and assume the prices quoted therein are what a buyer should be expected to pay.

Of these, by far the most likely scenario for non-collectors is the first, but the actual likelihood of there being a rare stamp in a casual collector's collection is pretty small. (Too, I am reminded of the advice I heard given to a fellow who walked into a stamp store a couple of years ago, wanting to sell the dealer a bunch of mint, i.e., never used, U.S. postage stamps from the 1970s: "Use them for postage, because you would be hard-pressed to find a dealer who'd buy them from you at even face value.")

In the case of the stamps I saw today, the seller was willing to part with the album (and a bunch of envelopes that were inside the album) for a song, and after looking at all the stamps at my leisure, I've concluded I just about got my money's worth (though there were some interesting items I hadn't seen before).

Talking about things I haven't seen at any garage sale, ever, I've never seen any kind of decent "player's" chess set, by which I mean one of Staunton design, with weighted pieces, preferably made of wood, where the kings are at least 3-1/2 inches tall. Nor have I ever seen a chess clock, for that matter (an unmistakable item, with two clock faces in one case).

Just some observations...