This week has had emails from annoying clients every day right at the start of the day. Emails from clients that don't communicate internally so that your Point of Contact agrees to something but then never communicates that to the rest of their team, so you get questions about it for months. Clients that expect you to be at their beck and call and let them have meetings with you on 15 minutes notice. Clients that want meetings to discuss or clarify things that are clearly written in the report... not that they would know that because they never read the report, even when you told them in an email what section or what page to look at... That kind of thing.

However, I did get one bit of good news in the midst of this!

Huzzah!

We have made it to quality control! Grades soon! Maybe! - Probably!

I saw that it went to quality control on Tuesday, early in the morning, so I'm hoping that maybe tomorrow if I'm very lucky or maybe next week I'll see grades. I'm thinking next week is more likely. Week after next is possible. But I'm definitely feeling confident I'll have grades and maybe coins to take pictures of by early October!

Last week on Thursday I got a pink notice that USPS tried to deliver a package / envelope (LIES!!!) and so I was able to get out and collect it yesterday. As suspected it was my shipment of coins from a dealer in Hungary.

The coins are 2014 issues from New Caledonia. I'm going to make this easy on me (be lazy) and use the seller's images to show the coins for the most part.

I saw these online and thought they were very cool with the stylized, abstract turtle designs.

What the above images don't do a great job of showing is that the 2F and 5F coins are a golden-colored brass material that I've seen a fair bit of lately where the 10f, 20f, and 50f are silver-colored and probably made of zinc or nickel or plated steel. I'm not sure which yet.

The other thing I wasn't prepared for was the range in sizes involved - the 100f is actually quite massive, as is the 50f.

I'm not sure my picture below is doing a much better job of expressing the color difference (the 100f is an orange brass colored ring around a "silver" core, btw), but it should give you a feel for the range in the sizes.

I put the 2f coin at about 18 mm - same size range as a US dime - and the 100f coin around 38 mm - putting it in the same size bracket as a Morgan dollar, somewhat smaller than a lot of modern 1 oz silver bullion coins (~40-41 mm).