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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

Family

A Proof 2016 SAE for Ben - Aiming for fairness.

I just picked up a 2016 Proof SAE for Ben’s birth year. My mother-in-law gave me a 2019 proof that she bought when she visited the mint at the end of last year. That gave me one for Sam’s birth year and I got a 1986 - for our birth year - years ago. Ben smashing the capsule for the 1986 the other week - forcing me to go shopping for replacement capsules - was what got this back on my mind, but it had been on my collecting agenda since I was given the 2019. Cash was a bit tighter back then a
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"Ga" is for Goldfish, "P" is for "Poins"

Sam is obsessed with Goldfish, and shoving them in his mouth all day. He's started saying "Ga" for for Goldfish when he wants them. This means he's working on learning to say "gold," which is a lovely word if you like coins IMO. Meanwhile Ben has recently cropped up with "poins" and telling me he took my "poins." I had thought we'd gotten past this and he'd figured out "coins," but it has made a comeback recently. My wife doesn't want me correcting him too much because she thinks its adorab
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Collecting cards is more complicated than I would have thought…

So… Ben has gotten in to Yugioh cards… He started watching it on Netflix after he’d been watching lots of Pokemon and Bakugan and other anime and Netflix suggested it. Thank you for that suggestion Netflix… So helpful. So we had a collection of Pokemon cards that was mostly a hand me down from me / my youth, a collection of bakugan, a now rather staggering collection of Beyblades, and now he wants to collect Yugioh Cards and play duel monsters… So, we’ve definitely got t
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Taking my shiny right out of my hands, but getting away with it for being cute.

Following up on my last post, just  for fun. I'd left the 2018 American Innovation coin on my dresser. I picked it up and was going to take it to join the other coins. Sam was in the room and it caught his eye and he demanded that I hand it over. He proceeded to walk around with it, wave it around and look at it. I think this is one of those times when you just have to say "what the heck," and let them have it. Worst case scenario is he manages to break something I couldn't break
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The Queen's Beasts continue... Ben making out like a bandit

I haven't been posting to this journal as much lately because my focus has been on my Zimbabwe note set the last 2-3 weeks and so I've been posting over on the PMG side - go look if you actually want to see me ramble about that hyperinflation set some more. I think I mentioned this before but I recently convinced my wife to let me violate the normal limits on my budget and use part of that Stimulus check to buy some of the coins I needed for my queen's beast sets - the last 2 Yales I needed
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So that was definitely for him.

Yesterday was the Bday. I finally found out what Ben's present for me was and it was swords... a set of 6 foam swords. Which he has had great fun running around with and playing with, including with his mother while I'm working. I'm so glad that those are mine. Clearly. They don't hurt when you get hit with them though so I guess that is a form of gift. A form of one... My in-laws gifted me an Uncirc 2020 SAE, which is nice - after some recent discussions here though and current silver pri
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Starting work on PawPaw's coins

Some of the 2x2s I ordered came in today and Ben wanted to play with them not really understanding what they were so I agreed to work with him with them when Sam was napping. We sat down with the bag of coins from PawPaw and the staplers and tried to put some in the 2x2s. He lost interest quickly. He still struggles with the stapler. He's young. He doesn't get it fully. I'm easily more interested in these than he is, but maybe that'll change with time. He's four. I still need to remember th
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Some Updates… That escalated quickly... very quickly.

Sam’s intensive therapy is over. Yay! His last day was actually the Thursday I posted about getting the plaque in the mail. Three weeks of stress and crying and having a generally unhappy 2-year-old can end – but it was for his own good, and he did great. He’s supposed to continue to wear a cast and restrict his left hand one day a week and one meal a day to continue the development of motor skills with his right hand, but that hopefully won’t be as contentious. Shandy and I both got the fi
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We may yet buy a house this month...

So we (finally) got an appraisal back on the house. It was supposed to be delivered Tuesday and we were assured it always comes in on or before the due date and... the appraiser missed due date... This ends a 3-week saga that led us to leave the lender we'd been planning to use for someone else local because they were not getting the appraisal scheduled, weren't interested in doing anything to move the process forward and we were in danger of missing our closing date over it. We'd been all
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The joys of the junk box... it goes beyond coin collecting.

I took Ben to that game store today while Shandy and the baby were napping to kill some time while we were waiting for the sellers to finally vacate the new house - it was the last day of the leaseback and they were clearly unprepared and determined to drag things out all day. We didn't get the keys until 8:30 PM after telling us 5PM and cussed me out and left the house dirty when I challenged him on it, but we won't dwell there. I don't want this to be about that. Anyway... There was a bin
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Haunting my childhood with my Son

The move has brought us back closer to Shandy's Parents and to mine, but it has also brought me back to being close to an old game store i used to go to as a high schooler, some 16-17 years ago. Ben has been missing going to the game store by the old house - we were lucky in that it was only half a mile or so from home - so today I took him to the old card and game store I went to all those years ago. It wasn't like going to the other store used to be - in this case its still 10 miles and a
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The Zoo reminding him of some things and renewing interest.

Ben has been off for Spring break all week and Shandy took him back to the zoo.  While he was there, he asked for this "gold" "tiger" (Lion) coin, which she got for him, and she said Ben was showing some interest in the penny crushers again, but she hadn't brought pennies and quarters so they couldn't do that. The elongated cent albums kind of dropped out a couple of years ago when COVID hit and we stopped going anywhere, including the zoo, so we weren't getting any pennies. I guess we'll n
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The 500L lots and wanting to look at the gold

The other day over the weekend I decided to finally pull those 500 Lire coins I'd ordered out and look at them to see if I'd gotten anything good / promising. I'd been wanting to look at these for a while knowing it would be kind of shot-in-the-dark and I might have something good or I might have gotten nothing. I thought I'd sit down and look while Shandy napped with Sam and Ben watched TV. But, somewhat to my surprise, Ben took notice and wanted to look at them with me and was asking if t
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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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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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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
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