Half a troy pound of silver and some plastic

As I was approaching graduation day earlier in this month, another collector's society member was nice enough to offer me an MS69 kookaburra for my collection as a graduation present and even offered me my choice from the years he had available. He had several MS69s left over after upgrading his set to MS70s. I decided to take things one step further and offered to buy the others from him. It would allow him to get rid of some extras and allow me to make substantial progress on a set I like. He agreed and shipped them out to me and I sent him a check. He sent 6 coins and I got to pay him for 5. It was a very nice deal for me because some of the coins he had don't show up on eBay very often and that's where I usually have to go to find them.

One of the things that has always amazed me about this place is the trust and generousity of the members of this site. With most other venues, you have to wait until payment is not only received, but has cleared, before they'll ship the item. Here, I've had several cases where the other party in the deal shipped the item before they had received any money or even had any proof that funds were on the way, other than my word of course. Where there is trust and honor among people, it's a good place to be.

The coins arrived today, 1 day after Christmas and 1 week after graduation. I was thrilled to get the coins and enter them into my competitive and signature sets. This took my Kookaburra collection from 8 coins to 14, and I only have 7 left to go. After this big step forward, I think I may prioritize getting the remaining 7 coins to finish up the set. Since most of the coins I have left are later years (and, thus, more available and cheap), I may try to get some or all of them as MS70s. I don't really care about having a full MS70 set and I almost never upgrade an MS69 to an MS70, but having a few 70s helps to break up the monotony and improves the ranking of the set just a bit.

I also recently acquired a really nice MS64RB Civil War Token. I'll probably image it when I image the new Kookas and share images in another post. I love those tokens but I so rarely find one that I like, in a condition I like, for a price I can tolerate.

We're about 12 to 13 days away from the awards being posted, depending on how you look at it. I look forward to it. Invariably some sets get selected for awards that I've never seen before and it brings some really cool sets to the attention of the society at large. It should be neat to see what rises to the top this time.

I'm including a picture of a really nice non-cent from about 150 years ago.