Sam was finally allowed to go home last night. We had a follow-up with his pediatrician today and he should get to go back to school and ease back into normal activity on Monday. Ben is still, somewhat comically, trying to get his new front teeth in.
It was very difficult getting out of there. I have rarely wanted to call a nurse a insufficiently_thoughtful_person to her face so badly. They tried to give him 2 vaccines in his two thighs at the same time and didn't restrain his hands while I held his legs so he tried to grab their hands and the syringe and could have broken the needle in his thigh.
We got to go home the day after spending my birthday in the hospital. I would have been just as happy to ignore the day and celebrate at a different time, but Ben had been having a hard time and clearly needed to mark the day and spend some time as a family more than I did so we made it happen.
I was more than a bit surprised to look here yesterday and see the timer counting down about 12 days to the awards cut off. I’d completely forgotten a while ago that the deadline was moved up this year.
With November no longer available and the last two weeks lost to a void of fatigue and stress, I have two sets that would need a lot of work to get them ready and I think I’m going to have to choose between the Rhodesian Pennies and the Venezuelan Set for getting something mostly ready for the cut-off. And I think it’s going to be the Rhodesian Pennies.
I think I can maybe get pictures up for both and I might even be able to get a banner image up for both. I can maybe even get descriptions in for the Venezuelan coins about how they were bought and such. But I’d hoped to have a lot of information about that set about the history of the coins and the country, the timeline of events and such and I just do not have the time or the energy to research that and put that together at this point. I want that set to be an equal companion to the notes set and the Zimbabwean sets, and that just takes a lot of time and a lot of work, and I haven’t been able to do it up to now and now we’re at the end, at least for this year.
Fortunately, I was able to take pictures of the new 500 Lire coins that came back - pictures that match up pretty well visually with what was there before - and that set is pretty ready to go. I’m happy with that one and I’m proud of what I built for Shandy. So that one at least I don’t have to worry about.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll just bust my butt this weekend and next and surprise myself?
The birthday present ended up lining up with the circumstances better than I would have imagined. The Zimbabwean note set is so closely associated for me with Sam and Sam’s birth and now this set, which expands upon it, takes a big step forward on a birthday I spent in the hospital with him.
Maybe I just need to abandon the whole damn thing and, if I do, he’ll stop having to go back to the hospital? Anyone think I’m that lucky? Nah. I think I'm just stuck with the hobby as my stress relief.
Following up on some recent points:
I got that 2010 25C Venezuelan Independence Commemorative from that seller and liked how the one looked so I ordered 4 more, bringing the total to 5, consistent with what I’ve been doing, and I’ll be sending the best of the 5 in to fill that slot in that set later. (Seller's images but the coins look good in hand)
I’ve also gotten in the new three-coin sets with the 50 Bolivar coins from 2016, though I haven’t had a chance to look at those yet. However, these coins do mean that, if the Venezuelan set isn’t really ready for primetime this year, it should be nearly complete and firing on all cylinders for next year. I need to try to cut those loose from the paper holder he shipped them in and get them into flips. This is perhaps a petty complaint given the first half of this post but I absolutely hate seeing coins arrive packed like this... because, yes, those are staples separating the coins between sheets of 20-pound paper.
The day before we went to the hospital, I got an offer from a seller offering me an old 1965 Venezuelan 1 Bolivar coin – the last year they were made of 0.832 silver. They offered it to me for $29. On Tuesday 10/11 I looked at it on my phone and saw the offer was expiring in like 10 minutes and I just took it. It arrived about a week later. In that price, at that grade, it felt reasonable enough and I just felt like it, so took it. It hadn’t been my plan to try to mess with extending the coins in this set back to the “silver age” but sometimes opportunities come up. (Again, seller's images)
One of my eBay saved searched also flagged up to me this morning that one of my favorite notes dealers has, at long last, started listing PMG-graded examples of the new Digital Bolivar notes from 2021. So, I may be expanding the Venezuela Note set to include those in the near future. It's a little funny and amusing that the persion that had been thumping me rather badly on the PMG side and buying all the high-end notes for ZImbabwe and Venezuela seems to have lost interest for now. They haven't been buying, adding or competing for recent new releases when they come up in high grades. I'm wondering if Mike is seeing the same thing in Ukraine.
My in-laws had my car through most of the last 2 weeks so they could have car-seats to help with Ben, so they got together and detailed / cleaned the 6-year-old car and it looks quite nice now. I'll have to try to treat the car a little better and try to keep it a little cleaner and nicer this time. This is something Shandy and I had been wanting and planning to do since we paid it off and then they decided to do it for my birthday. Shandy is now offering, since that now didn’t come out of our budget, to let me go out and use a roughly equivalent amount for some nice coin or something else I couldn’t normally ask for from family for a gift. So I’ll have to give some thought to what I might want to use that for. I have no major leads or thoughts at the moment. I had considered going for a Gold 20 Bolivar from around 1930 but I'm not really seeing anything like that at a price I like at the moment.
So, there is the rambling, multi-front update.
- Fenntucky Mike and Coinbuf
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