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About this journal

This journal was originally to record my thoughts on collecting and building my Netherlands Wilhelm III Gold 10 Gulden Set and other projects like  my modern silver bullion NCLT sets. When it got started in the summer of 2007 I was single, in my early 20's, and working on my B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering. Starting in 2016, with my marriage and the birth of my first son, Benjamin, much of my writing has focused on raising my sons to have a love of collecting coins and exonumia and discussing how my collecting occurs in the context of my marriage and life overall.

Entries in this journal

An Italian coin from about 700 years ago.

This is a somewhat over-due post in that most of what I’m talking about here happened a month or so ago, but… I’d said in June that Shandy and I went into a coin shop together and she’d looked at an ancient coin from Italy / that part of the world. She was intrigued by it but she wasn’t interested enough to pull the trigger on the small old brown copper coin. I’d gone on eBay after that, looking for old / ancient coins from that part of the world to see if I might track something down

Revenant

Revenant in Family

Well, Beryl was no fun at all

For anyone wondering how we made out with Hurricane Beryl, we were without power for 4 days. It went out on Monday morning about 3:40 AM and it didn’t come back until around 7 PM on Thursday. We initially went over to my in-laws house 7 minutes away because they had a generator that could power the AC, but then on Wednesday the generator failed – probably a problem with the regulator – and we had to go out to Winnie to get a hotel room for the night – a frankly crappy, tired-looking little hotel

Time to get ZiGgy....

I’ve been periodically checking to see if sets of the new 2024 ZiG coins would pop up on eBay. Last night, I checked again, and some had popped up at reasonable prices, including some sets being offered by a dealer in Ukraine that I’ve bought a lot of coins from in the past both for my Zimbabwe set and some other projects. Apparently, they’d been up a bit and 10 sets had already sold. They were showing 4 left, for a Buy It Now of $7.19 with some auctions going starting at $1.00 too. I decid

He certainly seems to be going for it:

Well, it certainly looks like PA JK is out to take me out of the #1 spot on the Zimbabwe set: I gotta say I'm surprised. I didn't think there'd be too many other people out there that determined to sink money into what I'm still pretty sure is a money-losing endeavor undertaken for the giggles, but he seems out to do it to and beat me at it, after Xanno also completed a set. Who knows... there is the one coin he's offering that would be an upgrade for me. Maybe I'll buy it from h

What I found

Somewhat unsurprisingly the search for the 1924 Double Eagle at the coin shop was unsuccessful- they didn't have any 1924s but the manager gave me his card and said to call on Monday and he might have something upstairs, not on the floor. After that, we spent some time looking at the foreign and ancient case. Shandy wanted to look at a coin from Sicily from ~220 BCE that was about $160 but she decided the design didn't really speak to her - but it's an idea I'm going to remember for do

I guess we'll see what we see...

Shandy and I have a couple's weekend coming up that originally started as going to a concert for her birthday and has turned into spending a couple of nights away over Father's Day weekend while the kids stay with their grandparents. As part of this we're thinking about jogging over to a coin store on the other side of the metro area, near where we used to live and where my old office was located.  I have about $3,150 sitting in my coin budget and I'll have about $3,350 when we make the tri

Revenant

Revenant in Gold

And then there were three.

Well, somewhat to my surprise, PA JK has come out hard and has finished his set, as of just this last Thursday 4/25: So there's now 3 100% complete Zimbabwe type sets, heading into the release of the new 2024 ZiG coins and PA JK has taken away some of my Top Pop labels.  Having gotten an MS69 on the 10 cent bond coin and several very nice grades - including an MS grade $25 that has escaped me so far, I think PA JK is a much bigger threat for overtaking my set than I'd thought Xan

Looks like the ZiG is going to zag down. Hard.

Mike recently helped bring to my attention that we're about to get our first new Zimbabwe coins in about 6 years and my Zimbabwe Coin and Note sets are going to be growing again. The new currency was announced earlier this month (I think around the 5th) and they're supposed to release the new notes tomorrow (on the 30th) and there are already some interesting signs that things are not going well: They announced 8 note denominations and 2 coin denominations (0.25 ZiG and 0.5 ZiG)

The joys of the gold market...

As I've referenced recently, I've been sitting on and trying to accumulate some cash in my hobby budget to maybe buy a 1924 $20 double eagle in MS65 - my grandmother's birth year and now a newly 100-year-old coin. My grandmother would have been 100 years old in February if she were still alive. I finally got some things moved around and have saved enough that I now have almost $2600 in my hobby budget, and the coin, back in January, was going for about $2,500-2,600. But gold has moved

Revenant

Revenant in Gold

This was a little late for April fools, and it's a little early for 4/20.

Well, I've been a bit quiet lately because I've been hoarding my cash and working on some other things, but I thought I'd pop in and check things out. I got quite a shock when I saw this: I've said before that I thought that set was strong enough that it had a good chance of holding up over time, so this immediately got my attention and then I see this: I've been aware that Xanno was trying to complete his set and he was rapidly filling his in, but how is it even

Following through on the Koalas and maybe going for a bucket list coin....

After my mother-in-law got me an MS70 2013 Koala, that got me looking at the set again. My wife got me the 2014 and 2016 in MS70 coins as part of my anniversary present a couple of weeks ago. Around the same time I scored pretty good deals on the 2019 and 2022 coins... As a funny aside, entered in the 2022 coin this morning, and I saw the pictures entered in the data base for the coin... that... doesn't quite look right...   So that leaves me just needing to get the 2015, 2018, 2

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Revenant in NCLT

Well, That didn't quite pan out...

About 4 years ago my Mother-in-Law went to New York and, while she was there, she stopped by the Mint in Philadelphia and bought me a proof SAE and a 2019 Birth Year set for our then new baby, Sam. I hadn't really been aware that these were a thing, so I hadn't gotten one when Ben was born, and, of course, in 2019, they were sold out of 2016. I've kept an eye out on eBay for the last few years but 2016 seems to be a harder-than-most year for these sets and if one ever comes up th

Revenant

Revenant in Family

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

I hope everyone on here had a Good Christmas a few days ago and is looking forward to a good New Year's Eve and New Years Day. We'll be hosting a New Year's Eve party this year because Ben really liked it that one year and he wants one. From a coin collecting standpoint this year was a little more muted than last year - Shandy got me a 2023 MS70 Panda, surprising me after head-faking with the Koalas. I also got Choya a 1982-D Half dollar to fill in a hole in one of the year

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Revenant in Family

Happy Belated Thanksgiving

Posting this a little late, but I thought I'd say "Happy Thanksgiving" to everyone. I found myself remembering a recent conversation with Ben, where he was wondering when he'd get his own cell phone (recall: he is 7), and we thought he'd probably get one in a few years, maybe as he's getting into middle school and starting to do things for school and such without us around or with him more, but we also pointed out that this would be subject to us having the money / funds available at the ti

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Revenant in Family

Moldovan (Transnistrian?) Turtles

One of the predictable outcomes of me starting to work more seriously on a collection / set of coins with a turtle theme is that its going to have me branching out into some more things and giving me extra opportunities to digress into, "Hey! Look at this thing I just found!" I recently found a seller offering 4 of these coins from that feature a sea turtle. I ordered all 4 of the ones they had listed. When those came in and looked great, and I saw the seller had listed 3 more, I ordered th

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Revenant in Turtle Coins

Some additional random bits of Nonsense

Thought I’d throw some notes out about some other nonsense that probably doesn’t rate having a stand-alone post: I recently found myself wanting/ needing to get more boxes again for the first time since 2020, and I decided to do something a little different. I remembered that NGC had sold red boxes with gold lettering instead of the standard grey / silver ones with blue lettering. NGC is sold out of those but there are sellers on Amazon that have them for re-sale at reasonable-ish prices. J

Revenant

Revenant in Random Nonsense

A Bouquet of Flame Lilies

I had mentioned recently that I’d ordered a Rhodesian 3 Pence (1 1957 in MS66) to go with the Rhodesian Federation 6 pence my wife gave me for my Birthday. Shortly thereafter I saw that I seller I’ve used for a lot of my Rhodesian Federation coinage had a 1955 and a 1964 in MS66, so I put in some offers, which they accepted. After the coins spent a week in the Post Office, after the substitute carrier once again just put a slip of paper in the mailbox and didn’t come to the door, ring

Belated Presents and getting the bug again.

I got some belated birthday presents from my wife’s family this weekend and I finally got to find out what my wife said when she said she’d given her mother her “other idea.” My MIL gave me an NGC MS70 2013 Koala. I had not been looking at these in a while and they weren’t on my wish list on eBay. She went into my registry sets and found a coin I didn’t have for a set and went on eBay and found it, in the right grade. The rest of the set up to this point has been all MS70s and they got an M

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Revenant in Family

A bit of family history emerges.

A couple of weeks ago I reached out to my Mom to ask her about the date ranges for the time when they were in Argentina, where they were, etc. I wanted to have a little more information so I could incorporate this into the set description for my Austral set: The coins I had gotten came mostly from my grandmother, giving me coins my grandfather had kept. However, apparently, not long after I reached out to my mother, my sister found this in a bunch of papers and other things

Revenant

Revenant in Argentinian Coin Sets

I guess that's all over except the crying.

So, I've always thought the expression "It's all over but the crying" was a funny one, in part because when something is over people can be crying because they're happy or because they're sad. You see it on awards shows all the time with the happy cry, but, given that televised award shows are often for TV and movie stars who are, after all, professional pretenders, it does make you wonder sometimes how much of the happy crying is genuine.   What I never knew, however, but what a little bit

Revenant

Revenant in Registry

So... There's a 2 Lire coin, you say?

Some of you may recall that, when I started buying graded Modern Italian coins in late-2021 to build sets for / to celebrate / in honor of my wife, one of my initial wants / goals was as 1986 Mint set for Italian coins.  I haven't talked about it much recently because... it just came together quickly and I completed it easily and... it was built but doomed to rot in the purgatory that is the custom set feature in the old registry.   Seriously though, how do you even brag up a cus

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Revenant in Italian Coins

Birthdays and Battles in the Registry Backwater

The family and I celebrate my birthday this week / this weekend, and, this year, unlike last year, neither kid is in the hospital, currently - and I'll take the win. However, we do now know that Sam's in-patient time is going to start on November the 13th. So there's that to "look forward" to. I now have my historical blurb sections on 4 of my 8 Austral coins written or at least mostly written - these things tend to go through revisions over time and I'm still very much working on them.

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Revenant in Random Nonsense

The Australs set coming together...

I am now happy to say that pictures are up for both the Austral coins and the Peso Convertible coins.  I'm very happy with how these came out... But I'm thrilled to say I have a banner image now:   I always try to be mindful of how these look on the PC and my phone... One thing that was important to me was having a prominent placement for the obverse of the 10C coin, which features the national Coat of Arms. I've even gotten my historical write-ups done

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Revenant in Random Nonsense

This is where the fun begins…

Be honest – how many of you remember that line from the start of Star Wars: Episode 3? I have bemoaned several times over the last few months that it is hard to get excited or get motivated about building a registry set when you… don’t… have coins… But! I find that it is much easier to get excited about researching and writing about coins for a registry set when you… have coins… and have pictures to go with "da wordy bits." I also gotta say - even feeling slightly disappointed at some

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Revenant in Random Nonsense

The heat is on...

I managed to make a little progress on my goals this weekend, which is pretty solid in light of the fact that the coins hadn’t been physically delivered yet and 3 of my remaining 4 points relate to imaging and editing shots of the new coins… 1) Getting the coins programmed in and in the slots, (Except for the Austral coins) 2) Getting my pre-written descriptions posted on the coins (for the new $10 Zimbabwe coin, 500L set, Argentinian Set, and Venezuelan coins) 3) Getting pictures

Revenant

Revenant in Random Nonsense

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