
I wanted to wish you, my readers, a very Happy New Year on this first day of 2018. I hope the year ahead brings everyone great happiness.
Instead of researching and putting together another lengthy ASAD article today, I spent much of today simply relaxing and getting caught up on various non-philatelic pursuits. As I don’t return to work until January 3, tomorrow may have a similar result (although there is a topic that intrigues me enough to attempt to pair it with a stamp in order to share it with others).
I did put together a quick “stamp edit” for today’s post, however. I simply cropped-out portions of the denominations on various stamps to illustrate the year “2018” and added a bit of text onto a black stamp outline using PhotoScape, a very handy piece of open-source software that is much easier to use than Adobe Photoshop and my go-to for most image-related projects.
The stamps that I used for the numerals are shown below, as well as the stamp that “provided” the background (I painted out the design).

![[url=https://flic.kr/p/232jk4b][img]https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4731/39396298692_2d29b85548_o.jpg[/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/232jk4b]Germany - 202 - 1923[/url] by [url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/am-jochim/]Mark Jochim[/url], on Flickr](https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4731/39396298692_2d29b85548_o.jpg)


