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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

USPS Delivered

It arrived at the right place The coin I spoke of last time arrived today, in about 3 different layers of protective packaging. It's a NGC MS63 1932 Gold Eagle. It's a real beauty too. Sorry the image is so small, I had to really size it down to get under the size restrictions.
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Major Acquisitions and keeping my fingers crossed....

Hopefully USPS will be on the ball this week... Well, my step-father and I just ordered a major coin today for what I've dubbed the "Wright Family Collection." I'm not going to let any of you know what this coin is (yet) but It's going to be nice I can promise you that. I just worry about 1 potential problem with this purchase. Where all the other coins we've bought have been shipped to my permanent address, this one is going to be shipped to his. He lives on Harvey Blvd. There are 3 street
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Back at it with the Presidential Dollars

"The worm has turned and is now packing a uzzie." Back in December I bought some Madison dollars and brought my Presidential dollars set up to date, complete for 2007. I was fairly proud of what I'd done. The set had 7 MS65FD coins with MS66FD for the Jefferson "D" coin. The set was ranked 80th but with all the ties and such I was really around the 100th position, not bad for a category with 451 sets. Well, after that I started trying harder to finish my SAE set and finish my 21st Century no
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Steelies Stealing My Thunder No Longer!

I apologise for how long I expect this will be... I love the lincoln cents. I hope to have a very nice set of them one of these days. I have what some have pointed out as being some rather tough grade standards for the set but that just means the set will take longer to build and be better in the end. Almost ever since I got my first certified cent and started down the path of building this set I've wanted a nice certified 1943 steel cent, only MS66s or MS67s would do and in truth it was the
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Light Weight :)

Neverman doesn't know the half of it. I have always loved some of the topics that Neverman has picked for his journal entries but when he talked about spending 2 dollars to get 4 rolls of pennies to search through I laughed my rear end off... but in a good way. Last year, just about everytime I was on vacation I would spend time (sometimes entire weeks) going to the bank, getting one of those $25 boxes of pennies (50 rolls) and spend the next 4/5 hours searching through pennies. I would then
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Trapped in the incomplete

Nothing can get finished... Lately I'm feeling kinda trapped by my collecting projects. I have started large sets that I want to build and while they're great for long-term goals, it doesn't give much gratification to fill one more hole in a sea of holes in a set. I'm currently pursuing the following: Lincoln Cents [MS66-68RD](250+ coins) Statehood Quarters [MS67-68] (~180 coins) Presidential Business Strikes [MS65-66FD] (80 coins, 8 more years) Presidential Proofs [MS69UC] (40 coins,
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Another kudos to NGC?

What about the other person? One thing I think we tend to forget in thanking the NGC staff for handling our transfers and conflicts so quickly is the person who has the coin registered already. Yes the staff at NGC do act very quickly to get the transfers made and we should thank them, but before they can do anything the other person claiming the coin gets an e-mail to respond. In an ideal situation this person responds quickly which enables NGC to act quickly to get the coin moved. If the p
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100%

The joy of completion... As of today I have received all the coins and my Silver American Eagle set is complete! Finally I have a complete registry set! A coin for my 21st Century type set is also on the way which will bring that set and that goal 1 coin from being complete until '09. I'm also waiting on a few new coins to help move my project with my stepfather forward. This week has been very productive for my coin collecting.
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Presidentials in the Pit.

They aren't worth their plastic. An indication of lack of popularity? Like several others out there, about a year ago I decided to start collecting the Presidential Dollars in MS65FD for the business strikes and PF69UC for the proof strikes. I like the set on historical grounds and I wanted to get them, and get them in a form were I could look at them without having to worry about anything messing them up. I want these looking nice when my nieces nephews and children grow up and start learning
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Picking a focus for going forward.

Did you think I was gone? First journal in over a month. Well, I've been staying busy lately with school and work and the next two weeks should be "interesting." (Finals are fun) Even so, I'm still alive and I'm still here. (amazing isn't it?) I've been giving some thought to where I want to go with my collecting. Sure, I'm going to continue my Prez dollars sets and my type sets. Yes my Lincoln cents continue to figure prominantly into my long term goals. But when I think back to when I was
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Victory at last!

I have it! Last week VUMC409 noticed that I was going to try and build a set of Australian Lunar dollars in MS69. Since he wanted to sell several 69s that he had after upgrading to 70s he offered the coins to me. Being the great guy that he is, he gave me a really great offer for buying all 6 of the coins that he had. What he didn't know was just how good the timing of this was for me. I had actually been thinking about buying 2 coins for that set (1 of which was among what he was offering)
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The bubble is bursting?

Precious Metals are way down. As I type, gold is down $90 from its high ($920 from $1010), Silver is down over $3 ($17.1 from $20.7) and Platinum is down about $400 ($1860 from about $2250). Is the economic/panic bubble that has been running them up collapsing? Are we just seeing a massive sell off from people who have hit their target numbers and are doing profit taking? Did a miracle occur and the dollar has started to rebound?
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Joining the 10K club

I finally made it! I finally made it to 10,000 registry points! Yay! This is one of those nice landmarks. I also just achieved an all time high in the overall rankings. Over half of my points are concentrated in 4 sets (Silver Eagles, Prez Dollars, Lincoln Cents, Statehood Quarters) with over 1000 points each but I have other up and coming sets.
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The Registry as a Community

When we're at our best... I collected raw coins for about a year before I bought my first "slabbed" coin. Shortly after I bought my second slab (first NGC coin) I tracked down the NGC homepage and then started seeing things about the registry. I initially thought that this place was some kind of super competitive environment where only people with $100,000+ invested in their collection should even dare venture for fear of being laughed to scorn and humiliation. When I started looking into it
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One left.

Just 1 left before the set is complete. Even though I really probably shouldn't have (I've bought way too much lately) I saw a 2000 Millenium Set MS69 Silver Eagle going for a pretty nice price and I decided to go for it. Now I have 23 coins in the set, with the 1994 and the 2000 MS coins ordered. The only one left is the 1996 coin and then the set will be complete. Edited to add: Apparently I got one of the lower prices achieved recently; about $101.50 after shipping.
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Subdivided Registry

Getting 1 registry account to represent 2 different (separate?) groups of coins. When I originally joined the registry I was joining just for my own fun and to list my own coins. I started with 1 set, my eagles. My registry grew to contain 17 sets. Only 3 of which are anywhere near finished but almost all of them are sets I hope to one day complete. I'm getting off track though because I don't want to get caught up in that subject. The point is that this was my collection. Several weeks ago
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Being called "Obsessed"

It's bad enough when they say it to your face... Just yesterday, while I was out of the room, one of my family members turned to the others and expressed concerns that I'm "obsessed" with my coins. They also underestimated how well I can hear and I came into the room and made no secret about hearing them. Now, I've always thought to "obsession" as taking something to a clearly unhealthy level and I don't think I'm anywhere near that. I still work a part time job, I still bring home mid to hi
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The Points vs Rank Curve

Something funny the look at/think about. AJ Biddles noted earlier the Gardner is in a league of his own but I've long thought it was interesting that the relationship between points and rank followed a really nasty exponential decay model. Only the first 4 people have over a million, only 19 have over half a million, and only 357 (less than 10% of all registry members) have over 100,000. This is a crazy drop-off. The thing that I find interesting though, is that when you take this data and sev
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To: Bully Re: "In God We Trust"

Why not capitalize the word? Maybe it's because I'm a WASP; maybe it's because I go to the most conservative university in the nation, a school that values tradition above just about everything else, but I think that some things deserve to be continued and protected. The line "In God We Trust" first appeared on our coinage over 140 years ago and if I recall correctly the law that authorized it was one of the last laws signed by Abraham Lincoln. About 40 years later T. Roosevelt felt much the
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I'm glad to hear someone thinks that.

That's a great coin VUMC409! I couldn't help but feel a little happy when I read VUMC409's post but for my own reasons. Just a few hours ago I bought 3 lincoln cents off of telecoin and I was really hoping that this was going to be a good seller. 2 of the coins are for a collection I'm starting to help my step-father build (See the sets in my registry labeled "Wright Family Collection") and 1 coin is the first addition my humble lincoln cents set has gotten in about 6 months (The 1982 Lg Dt
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First Spouse coins crucified on the "Cross of Gold."

I've never understood this decision. Ever since I heard about the series I've never understood WHY the first spouse coins were done in gold. 1) The presidents are on "golden" dollars so making silver spouses makes perfect sense (to me). Making the spouses in gold was a money (greed) driven decision that has priced out a lot of people. 2) by making them in gold the mintage limit was set lower and many would be collectors found that there simply aren't enought to go around at times. Yes, there a
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My Silver Eagle Deadline

May 27th, 2008 On May 27th it will have been 1 year since I started building my silver eagle set. I hope to have my set complete (up to date) by that time. There's no particular reason for it, I just think it would be neat to have it done in a year. The silver eagles aren't a hard set to collect in MS69 if you have the capital to devote to it. When it's "complete" I won't be done working on it though. I'll have to send a few coins in for review and I'll be replacing some, some might be upgrade
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Bad Feelings about gold.

Time to order my Senior ring. The price of gold suddenly has me feeling ill... Well, last semester I battled my way through 12 hours of engineering course work in one of the hardest semesters I've ever had. I got a 4.0 for the semester. All A's, and something wonderful happened. I finally had enough hours to order my Aggie Ring. Getting this ring is everything to an Aggie. It is unchanged since 1894 and it is one of the most recognized class rings in the nation. The male ring is very large, ve
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Thanks, Michael!

This post is a few days overdue. I wanted to thank Michael for the trivia challenge and for the Barr note! It arrived in my mail box saturday. (To tell you the truth, I never knew what a "Barr note" was, just that it was supposed to be kinda special. Currency has never been my specialty.)
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It came the day after Christmas!

My 2006 W Silver Eagle. Yesterday I finally got the coin I've been waiting on all week. I finally have my 2006 W Silver Eagle. I got one pre-graded MS69 by NGC with the Early Release label for about $93 after shipping. I only have 7 SAEs left unless you count the 2008 (which I don't, yet).
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