It is only now, now that I’ve taken the coins from the submission and populated a competitive set that I realize I made a massive boo-boo when I sent these coins in:

I had 5 examples each of the 10 Bolivar and 100 Bolivar Fuertes coins from 2016… but I forgot to look at them with Shandy, pick one of each out and include them with the submission. I should have submitted 24 Venezuelan coins, not 22.

I think this happened 1) Because the number of coins and the number of different types with the same denominations kept growing on me and so I forgot about these Bolivar Fuertes coins, remembering instead only the 2004-dated Bolivar coins with the same face value. 2) They were in a page alone together in the back of my binder and I think I grabbed them up with the rest of the BsF coins, trying to get to the BsS coins, and literally flipped past them in my binder.

So now I’m sitting here, kicking myself, because there’s a massive hole in the set now when there should only be the 1 missing 50 Bolivar coin that I had not managed to acquire… for… reasons…

Speaking of the 50 Bolivar... I'd found a seller offering 3-coin sets of the 10, 50, and 100 bolivar from 2016. They were priced reasonably at $6 per set but the shipping was $6 per set and they said in the listing that each additional lot was $6... So buying the 3 sets they had would be $18... plus $18 shipping. I emailed the guy like, are you seriously going to charge $18 to ship 9 small coins (that collectively way 52 grams). The response was, that he does combine shipping based on the weight of the box. Just request an invoice at checkout. I'm like, okay, fine! I committed to buy and asked for the invoice... apparently I should have looked at his chart more closely because his combined shipping fee was $16... to ship a box that by his own admission weighs 80 grams, or about 0.2 pounds... I'm more than a little salty about this... but, lesson learned. This will be the first and last time I buy from him. But I'll get at least a few examples of the 50 bolivar coin and a few more examples of the 10 and 100 that may or may not be better than what I have now.

I'd also found a seller offering the 25C 2010 200th Anniversary coin for $ 6.99 each + $1 shipping, but if you ordered 4+ they'd be $5.59 each. I found this tempting to get one of these circulating commem type coins, but, not having bought from this person before and not 100% sure what I'd get, I wasn't sure I wanted to do my normal and get 4-5 of these to pick through from them on a first purchase. I just added it to my watch list to think about it. The next day they offered me $4.80 + $1 shipping for one of them. At that point I just said, "Sure, I'll spend $6 to get a peek at what you have and see if I want to get more later." So, we'll see how that goes. But if that works out that would leave me only needing the 2011 25C and the 2010 50C to have all the slots in that set filled.

So… on that note… I go to bang my head on my desk. For more than one reason now.

I hope you all continue to enjoy the sharing of my crazy and my misadventures... some of which blow up in my face, just a little.