I got an email today from Ali asking me if I really meant to use the word “Causalities” in the title of my set and not “Casualties.” She wanted to make sure I meant to do that before she sent the plaque in to be made with it printed like that.

I read that email and immediately wanted to bang my head on the desk.

I do not think I will ever ever know how many times I have looked at that and not seen that, but, props to Ali, she caught it. I missed it. Shandy missed it. I have to assume Mike never noticed it in all the times we’ve talked about this in DMs.

One of those glorious times where you flip two letters and autocorrect / spellcheck says nothing because it is technically a properly spelled English word, just not the right one.

She was great to flag this up to me and nice enough to email me about it but I’ll just ruin her discretion because I just feel like a catch like that deserves some thanks and public praise. She wasn’t going through and copying & pasting. She actually caught a subtle typo that so many have missed and then took the time to flag it up to me and I appreciate that so much, because now they’re also going to try to fix it in the announcement and in the archives and I don’t have to have that typo taunting me every time I look at that plaque.

Oh jeeze… I’m going to be laughing about this for days.

So, Thank you, again, so much, for that that, Ali. The correction and the laugh.

As a small aside on this, perhaps as another indication that I hadn’t really seen that set as being "in the running" and saw it more as a work in progress and not a finished product, on the $1 coin in the set I just had a throw-away line saying that the reverse showed an old stone fort at the “Great Zimbabwe” ruins. I went back in last night and added more information on what exactly the Great Zimbabwe Ruins are but the more I look at it / think about it I still have some more work to do, adding some more information - like the fact that the ruins are a National Monument area and a UNESCO site, and the “Great Zimbabwe” civilization is where the name of the modern country came from, these ruins / this civilization is why they changed it from “Rhodesia” to “Zimbabwe” in 1980. (Probably, by the time you read this, I’ll have updated it.)

One of the things I’ve tried to do as I picked and compared and swapped out coins from different batches from 5-7 different dealers / sources is keep a record of where / what batch each coin that’s about to be submitted came from, so I could continue to incorporate that information and the story of the chase / how the set was built into the descriptions for each coin. And I’m starting to write some of that out and explain it without being too long-winded and boring in the process.   

I’ve finished picking the seven 500 L coins that will go with the 22 Zimbabwe coins, filling out the paperwork and putting the labels in with the flips. About the only thing left is to pack them up and mail them, and the only thing holding that up is hoping for an answer from NGC on an approach to packing that I’m considering.

In the past I’ve just had short stacks of coins and rubber-banded them together. This time I’m considering leaving them in a BCW page, accordion folding it and then rubberbanding that, and maybe wrapping a little bubble wrap around that. Anyone ever tried this? Have any thoughts?

I’m trying to get these out to get them “in line” With turnaround times currently at 71 business days for World Modern I’m thinking we’re looking at May or June before the grades and the coins come back, even if I get them mailed off next week. This also has some implications for something else I want to try to do / accomplish this year that is a plan I'll talk about soon. But this has me realizing that, if I want the coins back before December, I probably need to try to get them out by April or May and dragging my feet and sending them out in June like I did last year might not end well for me.