Hello from the Horse Capital of the World

My name is Phil.  I live in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, where I have been since 1970.  I am a few months short of being three quarters of a century old.  I am a retired state employee, where I worked as an environmental profession.  I hold a terminal degree in teaching college science and biology.  Although retired, I still teach biology course as a part-time instructor at our local CC.  About 5 months ago I dug my childhood stamp collection out of the closet, where it has been left for about 35 years.  I started collecting stamps when I was about 10 years old.  At that time, I only talked stamps with my cousin.  I got my first good album a couple of years later.  It is a Grossman Coronate album.  I had years of fun with that album.  Back then I got stamps one of three ways: going over to post office to buy a few at a time, tearing stamps off letter envelopes, and going to our local 5 and dime stores to pick envelopes of stamps and supplies off shelves.  I still happen to have about 10 envelops of stamps waiting to be put in an album.  I continued collecting until I turned about 35.  About that time the needs of family, job, and pursuing advanced college degrees caused my collection to be relegated to the top shelf of the closet.  Even though I quit working on the collection, the urge to keep tearing stamps off envelopes and squirreling them away in boxes and envelopes never went away.  (Working in a state job and receiving work related mail feed that desire to gather stamps and squirrel them away helped a lot.)  Since May of this year, I have been dusting the old collection off, watching lots of YouTube videos (and taking notes), asking family to save stamps for me, and buying stamps and buying stamps and supplies mostly through eBay.  I have been reviving both my worldwide collection and my US collection.  I am still using that old Grossman album, and I have added to it a Harris Traveler album and an older, used Harris Ambassador album for which I have been buying annual supplements and learning how to
print album pages from free sources.  I am starting topical albums for flowers (that is the old botanist in me) starting with a USPS Flower Collecting Kit I bought years from ago, a topical bird album starting with blank album pages and stamps I won in monthly give-away on one of the YouTube stamp channels, and a topical collection of mushroom stamps.  The urge to collect mushroom stamps comes from the fact that my dad was a commercial mushroom grower for about 50 years.  Just this week I joined the local Philatelic Society.  So, here I am, old but having fun and learning, and wanting answers to a double handful of questions and stamps and collecting.