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Tuesday/ east west home best 🏡

I had a blast at the stamp show but it’s great to have made it home.

Ar Boston Logan airport, my checked bag weighed in at 48.5 lbs, 1.5 lbs shy of the weight limit. The medium size suitcase was stuffed with packs of stamp album pages and a giant binder to put them in, along with brochures and other papers.

These pictures are from yesterday, taken in and around Boston Common— the oldest city park in all of the United States.
The building with the iconic gold dome overlooking the Boston Common is the Massachusetts State House.

The next world stamp exhibition is in Prague, in the Czech Republic in March 2028.

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Monday/ Memorial Day 🇺🇸

It is Memorial Day here in the United States— the day dedicated to honoring and mourning military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

The Boston Fire Department Engine 4 Ladder 24 at 200 Cambridge Street has the old Stars and Stripes with 13 stars in a circle, on the fire station doors.
The 13 original colonies, or states, were: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island.
This flag was adopted in 1777, and replaced in 1795 by one with 15 stars on.
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Sunday/ the Boston Tea Party

The site of the Boston Tea Party incident is a short walk from the Convention Center.

The Boston Tea Party was a political protest on December 16, 1773, where American colonists, frustrated by British “taxation without representation,” destroyed 342 chests of tea. Led by the Sons of Liberty and disguised as Mohawk warriors, the group dumped $1.7 million worth of British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor.

The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum had already closed for the day when I got there last night.

I took a few pictures and then walked to South Station at 700 Atlantic Avenue.  It is a large train station that serves the MBTA Subway, bus lines and an Amtrak line.

The site of the Boston Tea Party in Boston harbor.
The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.
A block of four 1973 stamps to commemorate the Boston Tea Party.
A modern walkway and arches leading to South Station. The tall skyscraper above South Station is the South Station Tower. Standing at 690 feet tall with 51 stories, it is the sixth-tallest building in Boston.
The main entrance into South Station, at the corner of Summer St and Atlantic Avenue.
The main lobby inside South Station.
I took the Red Line with three stops to Charles/ MGH* station. *Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Puffers Building, located at 214-218 Cambridge Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill, is a historic Queen Anne-style brick building built in 1899. Financed by carbonated beverage magnate Alvin D. Puffer, the building originally functioned as sweatshops employing newly arrived immigrants in the West End’s cigar-making industry. – Google AI Overview/ Boston Women’s Heritage Trail
And here is what must be one of the orginal Massachusetts General Hospital buildings.
Founded in 1811, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is the third-oldest general hospital in the United States and the original, largest teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. Conceived to treat Boston’s sick and impoverished, MGH has grown into a world-renowned biomedical research and clinical care center.
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Saturday/ stamps of the world 📮

I attended the opening ceremony of the Boston 2026 World Expo stamp show, and spent the best part of the day looking at the displays, and checking out the offerings from the vendors. (And making a few acquisitions— nothing too extravagant).

There was a little pomp and ceremony during the opening of the exhibition. A marching band called the Concord and Acton Minutemen came in. They performed the national anthem for us, and then marched out.
Lexington is known for Lexington Common, or Battle Green, where the first shot of the American Revolutionary War was fired.
This picture is from the end of the opening ceremony, with the unveiling of ten new stamps issued by the United States Postal Service, called Treasures of the Revolutionary Era. On the stage are several dignitaries of the Expo, of the USPS and the Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (The Honorable Kim Driscoll).
A view of the main exhibition hall as one descends down the escalator from the main lobby. There are some 10,000 exhibits with a total of 4,000 frames, each with 16 pages, on display.
An estimated inventory of some $10 million worth of stamps are for sale at the booths of the vendors and at the auctions that will be held.
The USPS is a major sponsor of the show and there were long lines at the counters in the morning.
Prints of about 2 ft x 3 ft of stamps of the world adorn the panels that form the spaces on the floor of the exhibition center. I still have to track down the ones depicting stamps from South Africa. (Do you know where in the world Zanzibar is?)
An offering for serious collectors that also have deep pockets: a whole sheet of the 1918 issue of USA airmail stamps, 24c apiece, can be yours for $13,000.
The 24c airmail stamp from the previous picture was printed in separate runs for the red link and blue ink.
On one AND ONLY ONE SHEET, the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplane was accidentally printed upside down. These stamps are called the 1918 24¢ “Inverted Jenny”. 
When this single sheet of 100 Inverted Jenny stamps was purchased by William T. Robey in May 1918, it was quickly sold to stamp dealer Eugene Klein. Klein then sold the intact sheet to the eccentric multimillionaire collector Colonel Edward H. R. Green.
Colonel Green instructed Klein to break the sheet up into single stamps and smaller blocks. While most of the sheet was split into individual singles, Green deliberately kept the most important positional units intact.
The Centerline Block of Four is shown in this picture: Taken from the exact center of the original sheet of 100, this block features the horizontal and vertical guide lines used by the printers. This unique centerline block survived intact and sold at a Spink auction in 2019 for $1,740,000.
The famous Cape of Good Hope stamp from the Cape Colony in South Africa, issued 1853 to 1864. It was the world’s first triangular stamp. This panel is part of a thematic collection of triangular stamps of the world.
And here is the stamp that started it all: the 1840 Penny Black issued in the United Kingdom.
These were imperforate and cut apart with scissors. This is one has four full margins around the edges of the stamp. The display envelope with the stamp on goes for $295. So far I have resisted the temptation to buy one!
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Friday/ hello Boston! 🛬

Happy Friday.
I landed in Boston at 6.23 local time.
My hotel is right next to the Convention Center— the venue for the Boston 2026 World Stamp Show that starts tomorrow.

Pictures:
Stepping on to the Boeing 737 MAX 9 at SEA airport’s North Terminal;
Checking for cruise ships at the piers in Elliott Bay Boeing 737 MAX 9 (Norwegian Joy, Voyager of the Seas, Celebrity Edge);
Alpine lakes in the mountains in northern Washington State (our flight path skirted the Canadian border to the south, all the way to Boston);
Approaching Boston Logan airport now, with the Nahant peninsula, a one square mile residential community just north of Boston that is connected to the mainland with a narrow causeway called Nahant Road;
Landing at Boston Logan airport;
Baggage claim area ‘Welcome to Boston’ at Boston Logan airport;
Display signs at the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center and the night scene across from the Convention Center.

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Thurday/ the Olympics, noir 🌄

Here is an hour before sunset (now 8.47 pm), with the sun behind the clouds at the top right.
I am looking out towards the Olympic mountains from 13th Avenue E and East Mercer St.

iPhone 16 Pro telephoto lens with Noir filter applied.
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Tuesday/ a storm in Boston ⛈️

I have plans to travel to Boston on Friday*, and I see there was a severe thunderstorm over the city today.
Temperature highs had spiked up all the way to 96°F  (36°C), a new record for May 19.

*A conference billed as the Boston 2026 World Expo starts there in the convention center on Saturday. It is the 12th international philatelic exhibition of the United States and serves as one of the world’s largest global stamp and history gatherings.

A lightning strike west of Boston, seen from the Prudential Center as a severe thunderstorm approached the city on Tuesday, May 19, 2026.

[caption and image from nbcboston.com]

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Monday/ ‘Beauty looking back’ 👘

Ebay is the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to searching and buying or bidding for postage stamps from all over the world.

Still, to complete some of my sets for South Africa, I had to resort to South African sellers that listed their offerings only locally, on a South Africa-based website for collectors.

I’m going to have to do the same for Japan, but there are additional challenges.
There is the language obstacle of Japanese language-only websites, and many times the seller would ship only to local buyers.

Enter Buyee Japan: a proxy shopping service that lets you bid for, or purchase outright, Japanese products that are listed on local Japanese websites.

The Japanese on the web pages are translated to English, and the Yen amounts are converted to US Dollar amounts. Yay!
Buyee will serve as a proxy bidder for you on the auctions. If you win, you pay for the item. The item is sent to Buyee’s warehouse in Japan and then shipped overseas to the USA from there.
And this is a prize item that is being offered, and certainly found very few collections of Japanese stamps.
It is a 1948 issue, issued for that year’s ‘Philately Week’ in relatively small numbers. It depicts a print by Japanese artist Hishikawa Moronobu. He is known for popularizing the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock prints and paintings in the late 17th century.
This sheet of five stamps is in top-notch, ‘mint never hinged, original gum’ condition.
My 2021 Scott Catalogue says the sheet is worth/ can fetch US$350 when sold. So it should quite a bit up from its current bid prince of US$ 20.46 over the next few days and in the final countdown to when the bidding closes. (I am not bidding and will look for a single used stamp to add to my collection instead.)
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Sunday ☀️

It was mostly sunny today here in the city, with a high of 63°F (17°C).

The flower du jour here from Seattle’s Capitol Hill is a rock rose (the shrub’s genus is Cistus), with its crinkled ’tissue paper’ petals and bright yellow stamens in the center.
Rock rose flowers are short-lived, and once out of the bud, most last only a day or two!

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Friday/ so— partners, now? 🇺🇸 🇨🇳

Happy Friday.
Trump is back from China, where he tried hard to undo the catastrophic damage of his trade war— the one that he had started last year in April.

The headline of the order for 200 Boeing jets looks good, but the article mentions that Boeing was hoping for an order of up to 500 jets.

Front page of the Seattle Times today.

I asked Google AI to summarize the trip for me— what is publicly known about it, anyway.

At the bottom: “Highlighting deep-seated paranoia over Chinese surveillance, White House staff immediately confiscated and threw away all Chinese-issued credentials, delegation pins, and burner phones before anyone was permitted to board Air Force One to return to Washington.”

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Thursday/ blustery winds 🍃

No! It’s cold! Go back and put your thicker jacket on, I thought, as I headed out the door tonight for a quick walk.
The high today was 61 °F (16 °C), and it was only 53 °F (12 °C) in the early evening hours.

Looking west from E Thomas Street and 14th Avenue E at 7.41 pm tonight.
Shot with iPhone 16 Pro 5x telefoto lens, with ‘Dramatic’ filter added.
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Wednesday/ the new Fed chair 👨🏻‍💼

Warsh will probably be the wealthiest Fed chair in modern times, with financial disclosures showing a fortune well in excess of $100 million, including holdings in cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence ventures, though he declined to disclose the composition of some fund investments.
That’s separate from the fortune of his wife, Estée Lauder heiress Jane Lauder.
– Reporting from the Washington Post

Will Warsh be able to operate independently and help average Americans with their economic fortunes? (Keep inflation under control? And at the same time keep the economy going?)
He wanted the job as Fed chair so badly, that he (during his confirmation hearing in the Senate) would not say whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, and sidestepped questions about whether tariffs had contributed to inflation.
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Tuesday/ going up 📈

Lydia DePillis reporting for the New York Times:

Consumer prices in the United States rose at the fastest rate since May 2023 last month, as sharp increases in energy costs caused by war in the Middle East made life more expensive for American consumers.

The Consumer Price Index rose 3.8 percent in April from a year earlier, the Labor Department reported on Tuesday, up from a 2.4 percent annual increase before the conflict started in February and a 3.3 percent increase in March.

The increase was driven largely by energy prices, up 3.8 percent just since the previous month and nearly 18 percent from a year earlier. But the “core” index, stripping out volatile food and energy prices, also rose 2.8 percent over the year in April, up from 2.6 percent in March.

Headline inflation for April came in at 3.8%— the highest it has been since it came down from the peak in the pandemic. The Seattle Times reports that in the Seattle area, headline inflation was 4.9% and core inflation 3.8%, so both a good percentage point above the national average.
[Graphic by the New York Times]
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Monday/ books galore 📚

Barnes & Noble is back in downtown Seattle with a new two-level, 18,000-square-foot store at 520 Pike Street. (The store in Pacific Place closed down during the pandemic in Jan. 2020).
I like their selection of books.

From there, I walked to the Seattle Public Library, taking a few pictures on the way. I usually don’t have to wait too long for a Tesla to appear in view, and then I take the picture 😁.

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Friday/ sunglass weather 😎

Happy Friday.
It was a beautiful and mild spring day here in the city (63°F/ 17°C) with sunshine this afternoon.

I wore my sunglasses as I walked over to Chuck’s Hop Shop in Central District to join my amigos for a beer.

Check out the cute stamp booklet below, with stamps featuring an illustration by the Japanese artist Jyunichi Komi.

These stamps are prefecture stamps, issued for Fukui Prefecture, Japan*.
Sabae City in Fukui Prefecture is famous for being the eyewear capital of Japan. It produces 90% of the nation’s eyeglass frames.

*Japan has 47 prefectures (political subdivisions).
Starting in 1989, the national postal ministry has issued stamps to promote  each of the prefectures.
These stamps are valid throughout Japan.
Prefecture stamps can be recognized by the different font that is used for the Japan Post 日本郵便 inscription on it.

Unfolded cover of stamp booklet with lettering that says ‘Prefecture Issue — Megane (Glasses), Fukui Prefecture’.
1991 Prefecture Issues, Japan
Issued Oct. 1, 1991
Perf. 13 | Issued in sheets and booklets | Photolithography | No watermark
Z112 ZA112 62y Multicolored | Stylized girl wearing large orange glasses
[Sources: 2021 Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue Vol. 4A, Google Gemini AI]
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Thursday/ sea lions, bailing 🦭

Here’s a sea lion ‘action picture’ from photographer Ken Lambert, taken for the Seattle Times.

There are sea lions as well as seals in Puget Sound.
Sea lions and seals differ primarily in that sea lions have visible ear flaps, large flippers for “walking” on land, and bark loudly, while true seals have ear holes, short flippers, and move by belly-sliding. Sea lions are generally larger, more social, and agile on land; seals are more solitary and streamlined for swimming. – Google AI Overview