A great year of collecting!

Modern Proof Commemoratives2008 was an awesome time for me collection! I went from a casual collector buying coins from the US Mint to being more serious about my coins...buying from different sources, educating myself about grading, joining the Collector's Society, and having coins professionally graded for the first time. This year I purchased 79 coins already slabbed and I have had 41 raw coins graded. I want to break this down into 3 seperate journal entries so I can touch on the 3 sets I have been working on this year and to also inclose a picture for each one.The first is my modern proof commemoratives. These are great coins to collect because they touch on significant times, places, and people in history. There are quite a few coins in the collection and right now I have 46 in my registry plus a few others I haven't got around to grading yet. This is one collection that will take me some time to complete because at this point I am not collecting any gold comms but hoping that might change in the future.The one I really like the most is the 1992 S Olympics 50c piece that I bought raw. Not so much for the design but because after looking at a bunch of pictures of this coin I really thought it had a great chance of making PF70UC. When I submitted to NGC and found out that it did...I went through the roof. What a great feeling hitting a home run with this coin!