A Project is Consuming Me

I collect Olympic pins and have since the Los Angeles games of 1984. Been to most of the trading session in my area but I've not been that active in it lately. Back in the days BEFORE the Internet we known to the public, we used Telenet to connect ourselves together via our home 1200 baud modems and local BBS's (Bulletin Board Services). I ran on of these BBS's "Zola's Pleasure Palace", and used it to trade pins with people all over the world.

Since then, I have gotten many duplicate pins for my collection and have an Olympic pin page section on my web site "Visual Candy", where people can look at the pins I have extras of to either buy or trade with me. Problem with it is, the long list of text to scroll through and then click a hyperlink to view the pin, email me to see availability, and MAINLY me find the pin in the numerous extras I have, well I have not been doing a good job of staying organized and updated.

In the last few weeks, I have gotten a few emails to buy pins and I decided to make my life easier but organizing my extras in the same order I have my text list and also make sure it is current and up to date. After three weeks of working on it, I am proud to say - what you see is what I have. But..... then as I was putting my extra pins in order, I was looking through my 40 cases of pins in my collection and finding a few pins that were duped in my collection too. So I decided that was silly to keep two of the same pins so I set out to look more closely at my collection, making sure there were no more dupes.

Problem is, when I put the pin cases together year after year, I mixed up the years of the games making it really insane to look through 4,000 plus pins to see if something is duplicated. Sort of like playing that card game of memory. But the closer I looked, the more and more I realised just how many pins I had duplicated in my collection that I could put on line for sale or trade. I started to think back to all the times I trade pins with someone only to come home and find I already had it. An example of my collection cases, these are all NOC National Olymipic Committee pins from countries around the world.


The only thing to do is... to take every pin out of the boxes and sort them by the years of the games so I could narrow my search down. I have 10 cases to finish and that task is complete, (two weeks later - hey what else to do on the last few weekends of pouring rain and predictions of this weekend too). Okay and if that is not bad enough, the photos I have had on line - really suck at showing the pin well. Now that I have been blogging for a almost a year, I've learned the benefit of easily searching a "web site" for something.... Blog It..

Before (My old page)

After (Soon to be my new page)

So, here I am now, starting a blog after everything I have been through with my pins and my fingers poked stabbed and scratched by the sharp clasps on the backs, and MAN this is going to be my next major challenge. I've just started it and trying to keep up on three blogs now while working and watching my movies for my movie blog, well let's just say.... HELP!!!! I HAVE NO LIFE and that my folks...

IS WHAT IT IS

But, I'm grateful to have so many pins (which BTW - call me crazy but I really get off on the way they look) and I'm grateful I even know how to put them on line and EXTRA grateful when someone helps support my pin habit by buying some from my list. Hopefully my pins enhance their collections as well.