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Revenant

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Journal Entries posted by Revenant

  1. Revenant
    I wanted to share a bit of new vs old photo results. Both the coin images are of the obverse of the 1876.
    I set up my equipment the same way I usually do for macro photography of miniatures and other really small objects. I have a 105 mm f/2.8 VR Macro lens for my D600 and I added the 2x teleconverter so I could shoot really close in to the coin - having the coin fill most of the frame for really high resolution images - while still staying far enough back that I didn't get in the way of my light. I set up 2 speedlites. I initially was going to use both and have them behind the diffusion panels of the shadowbox but that was killing the luster in the images. I ended up just using one speedlite with a 1/128th full power setting undiffused. That gave me the results I liked the best. Using a small LED flash light to shine a little light on the coin made it much easier to autofocus with the lens. It's fairly dark in the shadowbox and the 2x teleconverter limits the effective aperture of the lens, making it hard to get enough light in for the autofocus to succeed without a little help. The circle of light projected by the flashlight also made it easier to keep the coins positioned consistently when swapping them out. Since the light from the small flashlight is so week it doesn't significantly impact the final image - the much more powerful speedlite dominates in the 1/100 of a second in which the image is taken.
    Hopefully writing all of this down here will give me something to reference and help me remember later when I want to do this again. I'm including a picture of the set-up on the floor of the room I use as a home-office for now. I suppose it might be easier to do these things if I just set all of this up on a table and didn't force myself to flatten myself out on my stomach on the ground but... hey, I'm still fairly young (31) and don't have trouble getting back up... yet.
    I was able to basically stand the slabs on their edge with them leaning ever so slightly back on the back of the shadowbox in some cases.
    I think the new shots have much better detail, especially in his hair, beard and the field of the coin. They also look a lot sharper overall.
    I'm not sure how this compares to how most others do it. Most of my camera equipment - except for the macro lens itself - was purchased for portrait and event photography and I generally find myself putting the same equipment to use here. I'd love to get a really nice lens-mounted ring-flash one of these days. I think that would provide the best and easiest lighting for something like this.  But so far I just haven't been able to justify the cost.



  2. Revenant
    It is Day 13 of our Coronavirus Self-solation. Frequent walks help make it not so bad with the stir craziness now. We’re taking the cars for short drives and driving out to the woods to walk around so that the cars don’t sit idle for too long.

    I thought it was a good day to have a bit of fun.
    A few years ago I ended up with two graded 1883-O Morgans in my collection. One is an NGC MS63 that I bought. One is a PCGS graded AU58 that another member here gave me when I bought a coin off them in the marketplace and it took a long time for them to get it in the mail so they sent me that AU58 too just to be nice.
    I’ve often thought about cracking that AU58 out of the slab because… it’s a circulated common-date Morgan. It’s not like the slab increases the value any and if I crack it out it can go in an album page and take up less room.
    Anyway. I decided today was the day. I was going to ask Ben to ‘help’ me and we were going to go for it.
    The nice thing about making a PCGS graded coin the victim is that it helps keep him from thinking he can take a hammer to the NGC coins... I hope.

    The thing is… I’ve always heard people talk about how easy it is to crack these slabs open and how it just takes a ‘couple of quick taps’ and yadda yadda. Except… We couldn’t get it open. And we hit that sucker hard a few times, on the edge and on the face. It didn’t break. It wasn't just the four year old hitting it! I hit it too! It suffered some clear physical damage, but it’s still together.
    This result in a number of ways makes sense to me. I was always confused by all the stories about how easy  these are to break. It didn't make sense for something made for archival protection to be so easy to break - especially given the likelihood of drops. Still, I'm having trouble reconciling the stories I've heard with this experience.


    The children's show on the TV is called "Word Party." Ben loves it... I'm not sure why.

    This has honestly given me some new respect for the slabs. I have that thing a couple of pretty solid whacks on the edge. I would not have expected it to hold up that well. I’ve dropped these things on the floor a few times and nearly had a heart attach worrying they’d break because of what I’ve heard. But this? Wow.
    So… what am I missing here? Is there supposed to be a mystery-just-right way to ‘tap’ these open?

  3. Revenant

    “PIF by Borrower”

    By Revenant,

    For months now I’ve been crossing my fingers hoping that I’d get a nice bonus and we’d be able to pay off my student loans and maybe finish paying for the cruise we’re wanting to take in October.
    I’m still waiting to find out about if I’ll get a bonus this year, but we just got a big surprise on our Taxes. Because we can claim an extra dependent this year and a couple of other things this year, instead of owing money we’re going to get some back and this is going to let us pay off my loans, pay off the cruise and have a little left over. We may be able to use that to eliminate one other debt and, if we can, that’d be three big bills / debts off our plate.
    I have to wait until the money comes in and we can’t file until we get one last form, but my student loans are as good as dead - 6 years early. My reward for paying 2.5 times the normal payment every month that I could afford it.
    “PIF by borrower” are wonderful words.
    … Now to start working harder on her student loans. That… will take a while and be fun.
    Hey, maybe, if I do get a bonus, I really will get to treat myself a little!
    As it happens, just in the last couple of days, an NGC graded 1880 10G coin has come up for sale in an old fatty holder with a 1959XX serial number. I’d be a perfect addition to my set but the seller’s asking price is a bit steep. If I get a good bonus, I may try to make an offer and see if they’ll take something more reasonable for it. If I don’t get a bonus and it’s still available in a few weeks I may just negotiate a deal with my wife, just like I did when I got the 1888 in early 2018.
    If it’s still available when I’m ready to buy, I’ll be really excited to get that coin. But getting rid of these bills will feel great.
    I do sometimes question if I’d be better served to have put even more towards the bills and less than I currently do to the coins and the hobbies, but this is my fun, this is how I treat myself, and there are worse ways I could do it.
    Yup... I'm probably going to have a hard time using most of that grading credit if I keep going for things that are already graded.
  4. Revenant
    I was looking around at pop-culture news on the internet recently as I sometimes like to do, as nerds like me sometimes like to do, and I found an article saying that there’s going to be a Funko Pops movie - it’s going to try to piggy-back on the success of the Lego movies. This has me in the mood to rant a bit. So this is me being my best “super-judger,” as my wife would put it – anyone reading this is forewarned now.
    It has been interesting to me that Lego sets have become collectable in recent years and that some of them have appreciated in value quite significantly - to the point that I’m now starting to see articles talking about them as “investments” and that economists have been doing complete studies and publishing papers about the returns they’ve realized. I think the whole thing is a ridiculous and insane bubble that is going to pop and leave some people in tears… but I’m getting off topic.
    I like / love comics and comic characters and love watching the superhero movies - much to my wife’s chagrin - but I have not and likely will not ever buy one of these little Funko Pop figures, with their odd, cutesy, chibi-style artwork, that retail for about $8-15 each most of the time. I just see them as mas-produced plastic garbage, the likes of which we already have entirely too much of in the world already.
    My brother-in-law does not share my view on this. He collects them, quite avidly. I’ve never been inside this room in their house and I’ve never witnessed it, but supposedly he has an entire room in their house full of boxes of these things. He has so many he has to store them in the boxes, and he can’t even pull them out and display them properly in a way that he might get some kind of enjoyment out of owning them. I find it vaguely insane.
    One of the biggest head scratchers for me is that these things occupy a room in his house and my sister lets him get away with this. I think my wife would murder me if we had a room in our house that couldn’t even be used because I was using it just to store my collectables. The smallest room in our home serves multiple functions as an in-home office for me while also being the place where I store photography equipment, coins, coin books, gaming books, and we even keep a twin guest bed in there on top of it all.
    At Christmas last year (2018) we got into a discussion about them and he claimed that some of them, some of the ones he has, can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. I think that if someone will actually give him that much for some of them, he should sell them now while the money is good and my sister agrees, but what do we know? I did some research after that conversation and found that there are a handful that collectors of these figures will pay $500 to up to $2,000 for, but these are almost all special, convention exclusive variants with limited productions of 500 or less. I didn’t see any of the off-the-shelf ones that he’s always asking for for Christmas on that list.
    To me, these things are a fad. They’re not at all unlike beanie-babies, baseball cards, comics or anything else. They’re popular and new right now, you’re going to see some crazy prices for a while, but, eventually, those prices are going to pop, and they’ll probably never see those high prices again. I think this movie is going to help build-up, hype up and extend the life of that bubble, but, in the long-term, I see these things going the way of the do-do. I wouldn’t want to be collecting them and left holding the bag when that happens.
    Don’t get me wrong - I know coin collecting has had its booms and busts over the decades as well and that’s something we all have to watch out for. However, I think those booms and busts in the modern context of coin collecting tend to be more contained to smaller sections of the broader market, in areas that I don’t currently participate in. I don’t think there’s a bubble in the 19th and 20th century European gold coins I’ve been buying for about 20-50% over the spot price of gold. I think we might one day see a crash in the values achieved by modern condition rarities, but I think that’s going to be a problem for people that collect those condition rarities. I guess we’ll see if I’m ever proven wrong there.
    My brother-in-law compared his collection of these toys to my coin collecting at one point. Call me biased, but, no. These made-to-be-collected toys will never be the same as 18th, 19th, and early 20th century coinage. They don’t have the artistry. They don’t have the history.
    It’s also odd to me though that he feels that his collecting experience is similar to mine. I don’t know if he spends time researching his collection beyond mere price-discovery activities, but it’s hard for me to imagine that there’s much to look into or research there (again, maybe this is my bias showing). But I spend a lot of time with my collection. I spend a lot of time researching it, reading about it, taking pictures of the coins and notes, writing about them here and elsewhere. His Funko Pops sit in boxes.
  5. Revenant
    I got my big surprise that my wife and her mother have been sitting on for about a month and a half yesterday.

    It would seem that, while in Pennsylvania for work, her mother stopped at the Philadelphia mint, too the tour and these things.
    The Silver Eagle and the birthday set were for me, the coin explorer book was for Ben and the birth year set was for Sam.
    She also got a bag from the mint that’s also pretty cool.

    The book for Ben is pretty neat to look at. I hope he finds interesting later on.

    The 2019 Proof SAE is an interesting addition. I have one from 1986, 2006, and 2007. I had plans at one point to build a set of them in the original mint packaging but I never have enough budget for all of my projects so it didn’t have much in the way of legs 12 years ago. Now that I have a 2019 I’ll definitely be looking to pick up a 2016 for Ben at minimum.

    I love that she got Sam the Birthyear set. If I’d realized they made those at the time I would have bought one for Ben. Apparently when she was there they had them for 2017, 2018, and 2019 but were out of 2016. I went on eBay and they had them for 2014, 2015, and 2017-2019. Of course, no 2016. I made a saved search on my account, just in case one pops up. I’d love to have one for both of them, but, either way, I’ll make sure they both have plenty of things from their birthyear.

    After dinner I was holding Sam and told him, “Your grandma claims she gave you a present. In truth, she has gifted you with a few hours of boredom about 10 or 15 years from now when you have to hear me drone on and on about these things.”
    I was quite pleased. I'd say my mother-in-law hit it out of the park with this.
    The new 2nd dollar sets (except for the P-48a, which just made it through customs in New York) are in the 2nd dollar set on my registry now. The set is now 75% complete.
    I’m headed out of town tomorrow. I’ll be back over the weekend and then flying out again on another week-long trip. So I won’t be imaging the new notes and getting those pictures uploaded immediately, but that’s something I’ll be looking forward too.
    Of course, celebrations don’t last, and it’s never dull: Ben spiked a 103 degree fever today, so that’s had us pretty busy, taking care of him and keeping him separated from Sam.

  6. Revenant

    The Canadian Quarter…

    By Revenant,


    Random Nonsense
    I find myself trying to take a minute to focus on something positive as its looking like Laura is coming for us - as if the year of the ‘Rona wasn’t bad enough without a Cat 3 or 4 Hurricane to spice things up. I always hate the lead-up to a storm. The stress and worry tie your stomach up in knots. Anyway…
    In early November of last year, I went to Canada for a few days on a job. These trips are not usually all that fun - I usually plan them so I get in, do the job, and get back home without a lot of sight-seeing. I usually just go to the Hotel and the Job site. I often think it would be fun to get to go to a bank and get some local coins and currency, but it usually just is not in the cards.
    I try to get my steps / miles in every day to get my exercise though and, on this trip, I took a walk around the area surrounding the hotel. On this walk I found a quarter. It was a Canadian quarter with Alberta featured on the back. I never got around to posting about this but finding this quarter was interesting and fun for a few reasons:
    1) I was in Alberta at the time of finding it.
    2) The back of the coin featured / referenced the oil and gas industry and oil production. Alberta is the center of the oil and gas industry in Canada, I work in Oil and Gas, and I was actually there visiting a field with a large number of collection points and decentralized processing facilities that was in a remote area.
    The quarter celebrates the 2005 centennial of Alberta, and 2005 also happens to be the year I graduated high school - and happens to be the year PMG was founded and started grading notes, so bonus points there.

    Prior to finding this I had not realized that Canada had their own statehood quarter program / were featuring states / provinces on their quarters like the US has been (for about 20 years now).
    It is not super-pretty, especially on the obverse - it IS a parking lot find, after all.

    So, in a way, it was a perfect token / memento from the trip, and I bought it home with me - along with a snow globe, which Ben smashed within 24 hours. It has spent most of the last year on my dresser and I see it from time to time.
    I was supposed to return to the area two more times for follow up projects in the 1st and 3rd quarters of this year but the outbreak of the pandemic and the crash in oil projects get a lot of projects postponed - both to limit visitors to the sites and to keep spending down. It's funny sometimes to think about how different this year has been from how it "was supposed to be."
    One thing I will say for Hurricanes - I think I’ve made more progress on cleaning up in the garage in the last 36 hours than in the last 2 years as we try to get to be able to bring both cars into the protective envelope of the house.
  7. Revenant
    Around the time I ordered that Lunar Monkey coin for Ben's birthyear I saw that a seller had listed 5 2019 Lunar 2 Pig coins that had the Early Release label. That was pretty much exactly what I wanted for Sam's year as an equivalent piece. One of the five sold almost immediately but there were four left and I felt pretty safe with that and I decided to wait and see if I could hold out for a 5% eBay bucks deal - always nice if you can pick up some cashback on things, right?
    About a week later 2 other coins sold in rapid succession and, at that point, I decided to stop waiting and pick up one of the last two - $2 in eBay bucks wasn't worth possibly missing out on what I wanted.
    Shortly after I bought mine - within a few days anyway - the seller listed 5 more of them for sale, but increased the price from $50 to $55. The price increase is more than twice what I was hoping I might be able to snag in eBay bucks for next month.
    So I got lucky this time, but holding out and hoping I could game things very nearly cost me an extra $5.

    I don't know if it's supply chain disruptions or production disruptions because of Covid-19, or everyone spending their Stimulus and bonus unemployment, or what, but it feels like a lot of the things I want to try to pick up for fun for us and Ben & Sam are sold out lately. Target has sold out of the nerf guns we got recently and now they sold out of the smaller nerf pistols I was looking at. They've sold out of the water guns we got before - I was going to get more of both so more of us could all play together with the grandparents and uncles. Amazon is out of the baby shark toys like what my mother got Sam (which they were fighting over) - all three colors of it… I don’t know that I’ve ever seen this before.
     
  8. Revenant

    So that was definitely for him.

    By Revenant,


    Family
    Yesterday was the Bday. I finally found out what Ben's present for me was and it was swords... a set of 6 foam swords. Which he has had great fun running around with and playing with, including with his mother while I'm working. I'm so glad that those are mine. Clearly. They don't hurt when you get hit with them though so I guess that is a form of gift. A form of one...
    My in-laws gifted me an Uncirc 2020 SAE, which is nice - after some recent discussions here though and current silver prices I'm almost afraid of what the mint charged for it. It has been a few years since I shopped these at the mint.
    I posted about what Shandy got me on the PMG side - a P-89 for my Zimbabwe set in 68 EPQ, which is going to strengthen my standing in a few categories there.

    Leading into our trip / vacation in the hill country my in-laws gave us a couple of bags - one of old currency and one of old coins. These apparently come from when my father-in-law was traveling and he'd always try to come home with a few of the coins and notes for each of his three kids. They decided to give these to us if we wanted them. I don't know if this is more for Shandy / the boys, because they know I collect this stuff or just because they no longer wanted to keep it. But these coins and notes are very much in the same spirit as the coins that came down to me from my grandfather and the coins I brought home from Scotland in 2017. Some of this is pre-Euro obsolete European coinage. At some point, when I have the time, I'm going to probably put a bunch of these in cardboard flips and I'll hold onto them and one day they'll got to the boys. I think when it's all said and done they'll get pages and pages of old coins in flips in a binder (or 3). None of it will be valuable but hopefully they'll enjoy them.


    My in-laws, knowing that I have old cameras (and that Ben likes to borrow them and play with them) also gave us an old Kodak Brownie and an old video camera that was bought by Shandy's grandparents around the time my father-in-law was born. It is dirty and showing its age a bit but with a little cleaning and TLC it would look quite nice I think.
    I guess I just like old things.
    Edited to add: I spent some time last night picking through the coin bag and was finding a fun mix of things including Greek coins, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, German, and some Kroner. A few British coins too. Fun stuff. I'd never seen anything from Spain, Italy Greece or Turkey.
  9. Revenant
    From Texas to Florida in a weekend. Wow!
    Whenever I talk to people about registered mail I get this speech about "it's slower than other forms of mail because it's tracked so carefully but it's much more secure." I get that, but how slow is it really? My latest submission was given over to USPS at our local post office on Friday afternoon (3/20). I checked today and apparently NGC has received it! I did a double take when I saw that. Interestingly enough, this submission was received exactly 2 months after they received my last pair of invoices. Some of those coins are still with NGC waiting on one of the coins to be replaced.
    I really can't believe that a supposedly slow piece of mail made it to out to Florida that fast.
    I'm forced to wonder what NGC's receiving staff thought of that package when they opened it. It was a relatively small box, roughly 8x4x5. Inside it were the forms and, surrounded by packing paper, a smaller box. That box (which was itself completely sealed with packing tape) contained the 6 coins of the submission, surrounded by packing paper. 4 of the coins were in their original government cases. The other 2 were sent in the airtites I received them in. All of this was an attempt to make absolutely sure that the coins arrived in the condition I packed them in and that no one could easily tamper with the contents. While the coins in the shipment are all modern, some of them were quite expensive and would be very hard to replace. Half the coins in shipment had a total issuance of 4000 or less and I believe some will be the first of their kind put in an NGC holder. The six coin submission had an insured value of nearly $500, because that's about how much it took to buy them. I've never sent off a set of coins for which I feared damage so much.
    I really can't wait to see how they do in grading. I could use some good news. I got a test grade back today. It was the third lowest mid-term exam grade I've received in 8 semesters at this school, but the rest of the class did so bad I still get a B after the curve. I get another test back tomorrow and I take another one on Wednesday... whoopee!
  10. Revenant
    My wife was having a hard time deciding what to get me for our anniversary (1/15) so I suggested we could go back to that coin shop she was in about a month ago, look around together and see if we saw anything.
    As I told her when we were driving there, I wasn’t necessarily committed to getting anything. It would just depend on if anything stuck out at me that was reasonably close to the appropriate price range we set for the occasion but I was going to be looking for something different that would stand out a little in my collection..
    Ben was in daycare; Sam was along for the ride – but Sam is a lot easier to contain and manage than Ben. We have this chest-harness kind of thing that lets Shandy essentially wear the baby on her chest or her back so she carried him around like that while I looked at coins. She looked at some of the Jewelry they have there and I think sometimes she watched me.
    I spent a while looking around at some things just to see if anything popped out at me and a few things kind of did. There was a 1936 S Buffalo nickel in an old fatty holder with an MS65 on it and there were a couple of 1834 50 cent pieces in VF20 and VF30 that I took a good look at. I was seriously tempted but wasn’t quire sold on them – though I actually thought the VF20 was nicer looking than the VF30 with the 1834’s.
    I probably would have gone for either the VF20 or that Buffalo nickel but then I saw some Type 3 Standing Liberty quarters that they had, mostly in the range of XF45 to AU58. Three of them in particular were AU58s for $80 each – a 1925, a 1929 S and a 1930. I asked to look at those three and one of the nicer looking XF45s. The 1930 looked really promising on the obverse but then I didn’t really like the Reverse when I saw it.
    When I looked at the 1925 I cracked a smile and really liked it – and my wife could tell I really liked it so she encouraged me to go for it, so I did. It was the clear choice over the 1929 S in my opinion in terms of overall look and detail.
    I have a raw Standing liberty quarter that I got about 12 years ago. It isn’t in nearly as nice a shape as this one and the standing liberty quarter is a design I like that I had wanted to get a better example of.
    I think it's interesting that these, like the Peace Dollars, use the Latin U's (V's) for the mottos on both sides of the coin.


    Edited on 1/30/2020 to add photos of the old raw coin I had, just for fun.


  11. Revenant

    Starting work on PawPaw's coins

    By Revenant,


    Family
    Some of the 2x2s I ordered came in today and Ben wanted to play with them not really understanding what they were so I agreed to work with him with them when Sam was napping.
    We sat down with the bag of coins from PawPaw and the staplers and tried to put some in the 2x2s. He lost interest quickly. He still struggles with the stapler. He's young. He doesn't get it fully. I'm easily more interested in these than he is, but maybe that'll change with time. He's four. I still need to remember that and I need to start him slow. I'll enlist his aid again to sort them by denomination and put them in pages when the pages get here.






    I made more progress than he did but I still gave up well before it was done. There's a lot in the bag and I was growing increasingly frustrated by the fact that many of these are larger and need half-dollar sized flips, which haven't come in yet... probably because I didn't actually order them (now that I check) because I'm a dumdum.

    I feel like I live in chaos... In the background you see my son's Bakugan (new obsession) in the piece of packing material from a new kitchen garbage can, which he claimed as his "Bakugan Field" and the gingerbread house kit I just bought, and ornaments from working on the tree and my laptop, with the living room TV remote... in the dining room... for reasons.
  12. Revenant
    Thursday of last week, when everything was going down with Sam, that MS68 1986 100L arrived in the mail and over the weekend I won an auction for an MS67 1986 20 Lire. That, with the MS68 1986 50L I got last year, gives me (or will soon give me) 3 of the 7 coins for an Italian 1986 Mint Set, so I've gone ahead and made a custom set for that and popped in what I have so far.
    1986 Italian Circulation Strike Set - Custom Set (collectors-society.com)
    The MS67 20 Lire is the highest graded example out there right now. Not to say there won't be MS68s later but I'll take a Superb Gem Uncirc Top Pop for now over buying and submitting and hoping for the best - I get some good grades and some not-so-good grades on my own.
    I have a 4th coin for it - the 500 Lire - raw that I'll hopefully be submitting in a month or so, once I can get my act together.
    In a bit of retail therapy impulse buying I also picked up an MS68 1994 200L, because I showed it to her and Shandy thought it was pretty, and the seller combines shipping. This logic seems to hold up. I'm not going to be shot for blowing $80 on a whim this week.  
    I seriously, seriously thought about pulling the trigger on an MS66 1986 200L. If it had been an MS67 I probably would have gone for it, but MS66 just didn't do it for me. This sparked me to look at some coins I have from Franklin Mint Sets that look really nice. I have a 1986 200L, 5L and 10L that I think could all grade quiet well. So, since I'm thinking about sending in the '83, '86, and '87 500L anyway, I'm seriously thinking about sending in a 1986 5L, 10L, and 200L, and using that to finish up that set, making it, with the '86 500L, 4/7 self-submitted.
    So... actually. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure, right now, I have a complete 1986 mint set of Italian coins in high grade. They just aren't all NGC-graded yet.
    Some of this is causing me to expand into a couple of new competitive categories and some of this may ultimately lead to Shandy becoming a force in the Modern Italian registry. And I do mean Shandy when I say that - The other night, with the 1986 100L in hand, I laid all the graded Italian coins in our room to show her the state of it. We boxed them up at the end then then she scooped up the box and put it on her side of the bed saying something like "I'll just take this and put it over here." So... Yeah. I'm finding them and buying them but she very much claims them. I find it hilarious and love it.  
    With opening up these new sets, that for now are mostly just places to park and display single coins in the new registry - because custom sets don't work in the new registry for now - I'm only really invested in defending the #1 spot on the 500 Lire set for now, but I'll take any other wins I can get, if I can get them.  
    There IS a competitive category for a 1991 Italian proof set, and that does make me wonder if I could get a competitive category for this 1986 mint set if I asked for it, but... I don't know... that just feels a little too self-serving of a request for now.  Maybe if I keep making these posts and inspire more interest and activity in the Modern Italian registry... But it is my hope that I get at least a few years before the Zimbabwe set and the 500L set suffer the same fate as the 1932 set and now the 10G set. I guess we'll see. 
  13. Revenant

    Now that I think on it more… this WILL start competitively

    By Revenant,


    Venezuelan Coins and Currency
    So, I’ve talked a fair bit about my plan to make a signature set / custom set around the Venezuelan coins I submitted and just got back… but I think I’m going to table that for now and focus instead on building out two competitive sets:
    Reform Coinage, Type Set, 1879-2005, Circulation Issue Sets | NGC Registry | NGC (ngccoin.com)
    Set Details | NGC Registry | NGC (ngccoin.com)
    Reform Coinage, Type Set, 2007-Date, Circulation Issue Sets | NGC Registry | NGC (ngccoin.com)
    Set Details | NGC Registry | NGC (ngccoin.com)
    In the signature set I’d been debating how to define my slots and what slots to have and here that’s done for me. When I am struggling with slot definitions and descriptions, I find it is rarely a good sign for the set. Recall: Gradually, Then Suddenly was my 2nd attempt at a Zimbabwe Custom Note set. The first one I deleted and metaphorically burned out of frustration.
    Perhaps, more importantly, these competitive sets can live in the New Registry, with the updated presentation style, and pretty set banner images, and they avoid dealing with the laborious old custom set system.  I can focus on the photos and the descriptions for now and worry about tangling with defining my own set boundaries later, when that part of the narrative starts to crystalize in my head more. While I felt awkward and weird about it at first I really have gotten more comfortable and familiar with the new registry format over time. I like how it looks more, and I like being able to add the extra little bit of flare with the banner images.
    It was different when I’d originally (wrongly) gotten it into my head that I’d be stuck with the coins split between 4 different sets, but it looks like I’m going to only have 2, and 1 of those is going to (most likely) collect all off the hyperinflation era coinage that came out in the lead-up to and after the first redenomination. Only the older, coins from before the introduction of the Bolivar Fuerte go in the other set. This lets me build a solid, already mostly complete and filled competitive set with all the Hyperinflation coins that are the part of the set that I enjoy the most and the part of the timeline that I enjoy talking about the most. It doesn’t hurt that all the highest grades I got in the submission – the 3 68’sand the 69 - hit in this set, and that MS62 can be banished to the other set, making for a pretty solid little group overall.  As a random bit of context, what I combine under 1 signature set for "Gradually, Then Suddenly" on the PMG side would be about 8-9 competitive sets, minimum.
    NGC, I’m very happy to realize and say, breaks the set in 2007 with the introduction of the Bolivar Fuertes. PMG, on the other hand, breaks the set at 1999, with the passing of the new constitution and the switch-over to the new government under Chavez. NGC also keeps the Bolivar Fuerte coin in the same set with the Bolivar Soberano coins – possibly for no other reason than to avoid having a Bolivar Soberano category that only has 2 slots / coins. But this is different than what you get with PMG, where each of those currencies get their own category. In fairness to PMG, there are 13 Bolivar Fuerte notes and 14 Soberano notes, so there are enough of each of those to support their own categories, where, for the Soberano coins, there simply isn’t.
    I put in a request to Ali and the team early this week to see if they’ll add slots for the 3 2021-dated Bolivar Digital coins and they added the slots only about 24 hours later. So, I’m going to be really pleased with this set category because it will house almost everything I have and want to show, highlight, and emphasize – for now.
    I do like the idea of later extending this back to the 1960s coins that were the last silver coins and following not just the run up in the denominations, but also the preceding debasement that occurred with the switch from Silver, to predominantly nickel coins, to nickel-clad steel. I think that sounds like a fun set – I just acknowledge that I’m not there yet.
    Unlike with Zimbabwe I’m coming into a slightly more established category. I’m not the 1st ranked set (a set with coins actually listed in it) to be added in the category – mine is / was the 5th created. And there is some solid competition here. FAS_Coins has a 53% complete set. I call him out because I recognize him from the PMG side. His Venezuelan collection extends back to the early days of the country with 19th century coinage. It’s a very impressive Coin & Note combining, PMG/NGC, platform crossing collection. I can come close to matching him in the 21st century stuff but I can’t touch what he’s built with the 19th and 20th century issues. I just wish he uploaded pictures more … because he… doesn’t. He has 1945-dated, P-31 specimen notes (in 67 EPQ!) on the PMG side. No pictures. But, his is far from the only set I can’t come close to competing with on older Venezuelan coins – I’m ranked 24th in the category… so I’m a ways down the list.
    But, as of now, my main personal collecting goals heading into October and November will be getting pictures taken of the 3 new 500L coins, the Rhodesian penny set, and the Venezuelan coins, and photoshopping together banner images for the Rhodesian penny set and the 2007-Date Venezuelan Set.
    I linked my wife to the new Venezuelan set to show it to her. She looks at it and says, “No picture?” (There’s no set banner) “It’s a brand-new set. I’m working on it.” “Somebody’s slacking.” “Thanks, Dear.”
  14. Revenant
    A couple of weeks ago now I received the award I'd referenced previously. In true 2020 fashion I got to receive a professional award in a Punisher tshirt and sweatpants.

    Because the organization wanted good pictures with the newsletter we had to re-do this in a suit and I got the whole family in on it.

    As the corresponding (and surviving) author, both plaques were sent to me and its my task to mail the other plaque(s) to the other author(s), or, in my case, to his family.
    While that is something I definitely don't class as "happy" I'm going to try to make something a little more positive come out of this and use the trip to the post office to mail off a coin submission while I'm at it. Because, yes, that thing I came up with the plan to do in July, which I said I'd do in mid-October, is still not done. However! Using this as motivation, I did get myself to fill out the first of the invoices I need to do today. I did the one for reholdering the 10G coins. I need / want to make out a couple more for some Civil War tokens and a gold coin I want to submit.
    This has me thinking about how I want to ship them. Part of me thinks it silly to worry about proper shipping / packing when they'll be cracked out and reholdered on arrival but I'm also going to be sending some other things in the same box... but then... maybe that's a bad idea. Maybe I should just bite the bullet on shipping and ship the tokens and raw gold separately...
    Of course... literally as I write this I'm finding out in the near term that this is academic for now. Apparently there's a chance my nephew has Covid (we'll know in a week) and my wife saw him just a few days before he started showing signs... So... as I write this, I realize I'm probably not going to get to do much or go anywhere for a few days... She saw him just a little before the contagious window was supposed to start if it is Covid but we have nowhere to go now and no one to see regardless. Everyone else in our circle is going to be quarantining now.
    Joy. No more small private birthday party or bouncy house for the boys this weekend... Ben is going to be very disappointed... He isn't going to get to see his cousins now.
     
     
  15. Revenant

    Dirty Gold

    By Revenant,

    I like watching documentaries and docu-series and I’ve become quite a fan of “Dirty Money.” I don’t know how popular it is, but I must not be the only one that likes it because it just got a 2nd Season. It reminds me a lot of “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” about Enron. I’m also a big fan of “The Big Short” and other documentaries on the financial crisis of a decade ago like “Overdose.” In particular with “Dirty Money,” in the first season I was a big fan of the episode on Volkswagen and the one on HSBC. The one about the Canadian Maple Syrup theft was a bit… odd.
    One of the episodes of the new season is called “Dirty Gold” and it talks about a more than a decade old practice of using illegal gold mining in Peru and other South American countries to launder illegal drug money smuggled down from the United States. The episode talks about the gold being bought using drug money smuggled out of the United States and then gold is imported into Miami and refined there - I never knew Miami was a hub for gold refiners.
    By the end of the episode they start talking about how widespread the issue has been and list a bunch of big-name companies that are under investigation for dealing in illicit gold and that these companies make and sell blanks to… The US Mint!
    They mention Elemetal, Engelhard, Johnson Matthey and others as being under investigation for looking the other way and not doing their KYC properly under the Bank Secrecy Act.
    At one point in the opener of the episode they flash a shot of some American Gold Eagle coins.
    As someone who loves collecting coins and collecting / owning gold and silver it’s crazy and slightly disconcerting to think about. I have my 1/4th oz AGEs for my sons’ birthyears and it’s weird to think that those might have been struck using gold that was mined by some guy in Peru getting $15 a day to run mud in a river while he’s slowly getting mercury poisoning because they’re using mercury to enhance their gold recovery, but I don’t even think these people know what proper PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) looks like.
    I think it’s an interesting watch and I’d recommend it to anyone that has a Netflix account - fun way to kill an hour if you’re stuck at home with not much to do.
    This is Day 23 of Self-Isolation for us.
  16. Revenant
    Well, I got the notice from NGC/NCS today that they're recommending sending the 1975 Tobacco Dove coin to NCS to remove Residue... No idea how that happened unless it got on there from the OMP back in the day.  Anyway... I went ahead and told them to remove it and then try for a grade again. I suspect I'm going to end up regretting sending that in at all unless it comes back as a MS70 by some miracle.
    I got the Zimbabwe Bond Coins opened up and into flips. This process was more interesting than I'd originally expected because I wasn't expecting them to be in then plastic pocketed sheets held together by staples, of all things. I'm excited about these though because they look shiny and clean and some of them look pretty darn good. I'll pick the 5 best - one of each denomination - and set those aside to send in once I get and pick through some 10-coin sets of the older coins.
    I wanted them all in individual flips to give them a better look over.
    The cost of submitting 15 modern coins is going to exceed the remaining balance of the grading credit I got so this will probably cost me about $50-60 + return shipping to do, but I think it will be nice and fun to have this and add this NGC-arm to my PMG Zimbabwe notes project.


    Edited for "Here's the update that may be longer than the original entry."
    Shortly after I posted this earlier I got an email that the seller I wanted to buy the other Zimbabwe coins from was running that 10% off sale - I knew I wouldn't be waiting long.
    Except... when I went to order, it wasn't taking the coupon code. I tried live chatting with them and they couldn't resolve the issue immediately so I had to just log off and I'll try again later.
    My plan at this point in time is to get the following:
    3x 10 coin sets, which may contain examples of KM-1 to KM-15 - I would be really nice to get at least one of all from KM-1 to KM-15 but we'll see.
    1x P-40 Zimbabwe 2nd Dollar Bearer Check
    1x P-45 Zimbabwe 2nd Dollar Bearer Check
    1x P-46 Zimbabwe 2nd Dollar Bearer Check
    2x Different PMG graded world bank notes that feature turtles.
    This will accomplish 3 things for me.
    1) With the coins I think I'll be able to get a complete or nearly complete type set of Zimbabwean coins. Since I won't have enough of the Registry Award Grading credit left to cover grading 19 modern coins, I'm not going to submit any examples of the early dime design if I get them. I have an MS-65 example of that already so submitting that makes no sense to me.
    2) Grading the 3 Bearer Checks will give me a 100% COMPLETE set of PMG graded 2nd dollar checks. That will feel really really good. I was literally going to make myself print the label and mall off the traveller's checks today, but since this came up I'm going to wait so I can ship them all there together, have them shipped back together, and hopefully save on some shipping charges.
    3) Start buidling up the thematic turtle set that I wanted to build for Ben more - something he will probably never care about, but it sounds fun if it can be done on the cheap - these two PMG graded 66 EPQ notes will cost about $12 each, less than the cost of grading. I'm very okay with that for gem uncirc notes.
     
  17. Revenant

    A fun update

    By Revenant,


    Venezuelan Coins and Currency
    Work has had me crazy this week but I wanted to steal a few minutes and share something fun.
    My Venezuela submission took a few more days than I normally see as typical to go from just "Received" to being able to see the list of the coins. When the coins did come up I saw some variety information that I hadn't had had been entered in.
    Notably, one of the coins I sent in was the non-magnetic, non-steel, zinc-aluminum version (2001-2004) and not the steel version (2000-2002).
    I had not even thought to check this or test this personally. All of the other coins that I had from that batch / date range from those lots I bought from my Ukranian dealer were dated 2004. So they were after the date range of the steel versions and they had to be zinc-aluminum. So, In that context, it makes perfect sense that the 2002 10Bs were also zinc-aluminum and not the steel version - where there was such a version. Interestingly, it doesn't look like the 50B version had a zinc version. Those appear to have been steel consistently. Same thing for the 100B coins from 2001-2004.
    So I'm thinking the seeming delay might have been because they had to research these a little or look them up to see what and how to enter them in.

     
    This might seem like an odd thing to say but I'm almost more excited about the Italian coins than the Venezuelan coins this time because the Italian coins will be mostly completing established sets and they won't be much work. On the other hand, I have a lot of buying, searching, submitting, and writing to do before I can honestly say the Venezuela set is complete and I just don't even know how it's going to happen. If you can find these things for sale in MS at all you don't see a lot of listings saying if the coin is magnetic or not. How am I going to try to hunt these varieties in the wild.
    I'm more or less "on-hold" with building out that custom set for the Venezuela coins because, with how custom sets get built on the NGC side, it will be far easier for me to build the set if I just wait and enter the coins in as I build the slots. It really is jarring to me some days just how different things are for custom sets on the PMG vs NGC side. It was quite easy on the PMG side to build out empty slots for notes I didn't have yet but on the NGC side it feels quite awkward. I don't know if this is bias from being used to / accustomed to the PMG side or what.
    Also, now I can't help but wonder: The Magnetic nickel-clad-steel 10B is 2.33 grams. The non-magnetic zinc aluminum 10B is 1.74 grams. So if they have a reasonably accurate scale they could have told the difference by weighing it, but I just have this visual in my head now of them touching a magnet to it (through the flip to not scratch it, of course) to see if the coin responded or not.
  18. Revenant

    Making Progress and Hoping for Good News Soon.

    By Revenant,


    Venezuelan Coins and Currency
    I actually managed to get my box to the Post Office on 8/12 and, since I decided to chance it on a Priority Mail Flat Rate box and not pay for Registered Mail for such a low-value submission this time, NGC received the box on 8/15.
    The submission is still not showing in the system yet, but, based on currently advertised turnaround times, I'm hoping I'll have grades by around 09/09 or 09/16 (3 or 4 weeks from now to be generous on my expectations vs 13 business days). 
    We'll see. In any case, that would put the coins back here earlier in the year than my first Zimbabwe Submission and that should give me a comfortable amount of time to get the new coins imaged and in the sets. The 500L coins and 1986 Italian coins at a minimum anyway.
    I'm less convinced that the Venezuela Set will be ready for "Prime Time" this year but starting to build that out as a Custom Registry Set is going to be next on my list of coin-related projects.
    My plan is to have a large number of slots in that Venezuela set representing issues and varieties that I do not have and I'm not convinced I'm going to be able to get them at economically attractive or feasible prices. So I don't know what the ultimate fate and state of that set is going to be. Because I started this thinking I could snap up representative pieces of everything and then I figured out how much I didn't know about and now I just don't even know how to get the stuff I now know about without feeling like I'm just massively over paying and over spending.
    Some days I wonder if it'd be easier to just collect US, but I think it would be way less interesting and fun (for me).  
    Edited to add:
    I've officially started building this set and posted the first of what will probably be many many drafts and iterations if the Zimbabwe note set, coin set, and the Venezuelan note set are any indications.
    Pain into Suffering - Custom Set (collectors-society.com)

     
    Edited to add, the submission showed up in the system as received this morning. 
  19. Revenant
    A few months ago I talked to another collector who recalled a conversation where-in he and someone else agreed that, if they had tried to build their collections today, buying graded coins and not ones they “discovered” themselves, they never could have afforded to build their collections because prices have gone up so much.

    I can’t help but think of that statement periodically and ask myself, “So do we really want the value / price of these things to go up?” Or, stated more usefully, “Do I?”

    The answer to the first question is always “it depends” - and this is true whether I ask it of coin collectors or silver stackers - like at the r/silverbugs subreddit. People who are accumulating / building (usually younger) want prices lower (or, at least stable, no one wants to feel like they lost money really). People that are selling or looking to sell soon (usually older, possibly who viewed their collections as part of their retirement savings) tend to want prices higher or rising.

    But personally, I don’t know that I care fore the idea of rising prices. I don’t know that I care if the value of my 10G set and some similar projects ever rises. Part of this is that I don’t view my collection as an investment - certainly not solely as an investment. I have a budget for “fun” / my entertainment and the coins are bought out of that. The 401K is funded completely as its own thing. I want to keep building my collection into my old age.

    Yeah, I like the idea that there’s some gold / silver value in a coin and that helps provide somewhat of a floor whereby I wouldn’t have to sell the thing for 10 cents on the dollar of what I paid for it hopefully… but I’m hoping to not sell. My most important projects are things that I’m hoping to pass on to my sons upon my death. So, value at resale is something I hope to never worry about. Meanwhile, lower prices mean I get to keep collecting.

    I do definitely hope I don’t take too much of a loss on some of these coins if I have to sell, but I know that I almost certainly will take some kind of small loss on them unless gold goes up meaningfully. Why? Because I’m one of the few that collects some of these as coins and doesn’t treat them mostly as bullion.

  20. Revenant
    Ben has been off for Spring break all week and Shandy took him back to the zoo.  While he was there, he asked for this "gold" "tiger" (Lion) coin, which she got for him, and she said Ben was showing some interest in the penny crushers again, but she hadn't brought pennies and quarters so they couldn't do that.
    The elongated cent albums kind of dropped out a couple of years ago when COVID hit and we stopped going anywhere, including the zoo, so we weren't getting any pennies. I guess we'll need to see if that / those make a comeback.
     
     
  21. Revenant
    My wife ordered my birthday present about a week ago. She was trying to keep it quiet but then Ben saw her and wanted to "help" and gave it away in a big way. I think she ordered something for my Zimbabwe note set but I don't know for sure so this has me trying to limit / hold off on major purchases for the next couple of weeks until she gives it to me.
    Ben has been very funny throughout this. First he insisted that he needed to get me a small present too that he had to pick out and then he kept talking about it. Then when it came in and the box was sitting in quarantine he kept talking about it being my surprise to my wife in front of me. Then, today, he and my wife open the box and hide the present while I'm still sleeping and he tries to tell me the box was empty and it was a nothing box. Riiggght. Because I was born yesterday... I've already been told by my wife to not expect much from this because he was clearly wanting to pick out things that are really more for him.  The funny thing is, even though he is as subtle as a brick through a window I still don't know what the presents are.  Not that Benjamin could read the pick number or denomination off a note, coin or label and tell me what they were if he wanted to... We're working on that though, slowly but surely. He's learning his letters. I need to train up my spy!
    New case levels and transmission rates for Covid have been dropping in my area so I'm trying to convince myself to fill out the forms, box some stuff up and go to the Post Office to send some stuff in to NGC, but I'm also reading that they're about 2 weeks behind in opening mail, which I find pretty de-motivating.
    Oh well. I just need to find some time and commit to start taking some steps. Even then, it may not happen until next week when Shandy and I have some kid-free  time for a week. It's hard to pull out coins, fill out paperwork and package delicate things for shipping when you have a super super helpful 4 year old and a 19 month old that is into literally freaking everything and wants everything in his mouth.... I wonder if a coin has ever been details-graded for having baby teeth / bite marks in the field or as rim damage. It's an interesting thought but not necessarily something I want to test. I might actually seize on that break / opportunity to motivate myself to knock it out - The kids go to their grandparents for a week on the 11th and I haven't been this excited about something for a while.  
  22. Revenant
    Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Have fun eating yourselves into a stupor tomorrow.
    It's a little funny seeing everyone and their dog putting on a Black Friday sale this week - with many of them extending into next week - even the coin and currency dealers!.
    In the next several days I'll probably place an order with one of my favorite merchants that will probably be one of the last purchases I make for the Zimbabwe set for a while. The notes will be part of my Christmas present this year, so they won't be showing up in any sets for a while, even once they arrive.
    At the start of this year I thought this was going to be the year I revived my Koala and / or Kiwi sets in a big way. Instead it became the year that I took a handful of mostly 3rd dollar notes and turned them into the impressive set I'd always hoped they one day could be. The set isn't finished now but it's much bigger and cooler than I ever would have thought it'd be at this point at the start of the year. It's been a lot of hard work.
    Meanwhile, while I didn't grow the set much this year, my New Zealand Kiwi set looks well-positioned to win its category again for the first time in 10 years. I guess we'll see what the final week of the competitive year holds and if that #1 ranking holds up.
    Getting back on track after that tangent though... while I will be making that purchase I'm going to be trying to save up my coin budget and "keep some powder dry" moving into 2020 and not partaking in most of this sale action for now. As I mentally shift gears and get ready to go "on pause" with the Zimbabwe set I'm not 100% sure what my next focus will be.
    Looking back on my other stated goals of 2020 I didn't do terrible this year. I wanted to get a 19th century French "Winged Genius" type coin and did. I wanted to get that 2019 1/4 oz AGE and I just checked that box last month. And I finally settled on a course of action and resolved my years-long debate over the 1875 10G issue.
    I didn't pull off getting that 1924 double eagle but... I knew that was a long shot going in! Maybe in 2020... if I'm very lucky.
    There's a part of me that very much wants to start keeping and displaying a coin or two at my desk at work but I also question the wisdom of this - I work in one of those Regis / WeWork style shared office spaces and I'd worry about something growing legs. Especially if it was something nice.
  23. Revenant
    I’m not sure if I should care.
    An NGC 1880 Netherlands 10G appeared in the wild in MS65 for sale! For $600! … Ouch. But it was perfect for my set!
    I’ve never seen one of these (already graded by NGC) come up for sale before. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it hasn’t happened in all that time, but this is the first one I’ve been aware of while it was for sale. A recent round of internet searching revealed that in Sept 2015 a PCGS graded example graded MS66 went up for sale with several other PCGS graded coins from this series through Heritage. I hadn’t realized that happened at the time. If I had I might have gone for those, PCGS graded or not, but a PCGS coin wouldn’t have helped my registry here, post January 2012.
    The thing that made this particular example PERFECT for my set is the fact that it’s in an old fatty holder with a 1959XX serial number - quite the emerging feature of the set.
    The Seller of this NGC graded example did have a “Best Offer” option, which I was hoping to haggle him down to about $525. But, before I could do that last week, he offered it to me - and the other person watching it - for $540 (+ 8.45 shipping). Neither of us took it.
    That was still more than I wanted to pay so I offered $460. He came back with a counter of $540… Joy.
    So, I waited a week. It was during this time that I did some searching and found that old Heritage auction result wherein the PCGS MS66 sold for $320 in Sept 2015 - when gold was about $1100. If you add the buyer’s premium and increase the cost of the coin to reflect the increased cost of gold (with it at about $1,650 at the time I bought it, but, boy, is it down now) that put the value of the coin in the range of $500-575. The NumisMaster price guide (that you get through NGC) puts the coin at $475 in MS63 (but those prices are almost always inflated, and they list the same price for the common date 1876 and 1877s which usually don’t go for that much). That made the price the seller was looking for not entirely unreasonable, but it was still somewhat higher than what I’d really wanted to pay.
    I came back Monday morning (3/9) and offered $500, hoping he’d budge a little - maybe give me the $525 I’d hoped for? He counter offered $540… Okay… so no budge on that at all then.
    I sat on it at that point and thought on it throughout the day and ultimately decided to buy the coin for $540. Part of my reluctance had arisen from the fact that I’d only paid $500 for my 1888 - which is the rarest issue and the key date of the series. But… the melt value of the coin has gone up by about $75 since I bought the 1888 and the 1888 was in a new-gen, pronged holder where this was in an old fatty, and, right or wrong, people tend to ask for premiums for coins in old fatties.
    Also, while the 1888 is the rare key date of the series, this 1880 issue has the third lowest mintage of the series at just over 50,000 made. And, with the addition of this coin to my set, I have the three lowest mintage issues - all in old fatty holders with 19XXXX serials. These coins were graded around 1993. They’ve been in these slabs since I was about 6 years old.
    While I would have preferred to pay a little less for it, at the end of the day this coin is too perfect for the set and too rare and hard to find for me to let this go over about 5%. As it happens, part of the reason I waited to make another offer and made the offer yesterday was that eBay had given me a 5% eBay bucks deal, so I’ll get $27 in eBay Bucks next month, in addition to what I was getting from the purchase of the British Sovereign. So, I suppose there’s that little win.
    I will also say that I bought this at least to some degree counting on the fact that it is NGC graded and in an Old Fatty holder, because the seller’s pictures on the listing are marginal at best. I’ve never been disappointed with an NGC-graded MS65 in this series and I do think that some of my coins in these old fatties could get MS66 grades if I wanted to go for the re-grade.


    Sorry! This was a long one! Thanks for reading if you did!
  24. Revenant

    On to Venezuela?

    By Revenant,


    Venezuelan Coins and Currency
    The first of the packages of Venezuelan Coins from the Ukrainian dealer arrived. The box that came was the 2nd one shipped, containing the 2021 Digital Bolivar Coins. The first package is still showing it was last seen in Kiev. I guess we'll see on that one – but I’m mostly considering that one a lost cause after over a week with no updates. I’ll just be pleasantly surprised if I’m wrong. But at least I already had some of those from a prior order and dollarwise what I got this weekend was the bulk of the order.
    For a package that started its journey by leaving a war zone, the “last mile” to my house seems to have been almost more dramatic, at least with regard to the tracking history. It was supposed to be delivered a week ago on Saturday, then USPS didn’t actually attempt and said it would be delivered on Monday. Then they scanned it as being at the post office and didn’t try to deliver on Monday. When the NGC box came on Tuesday I was expecting that knock to be about the Ukrainian package, but, nope. Then, finally, on Wednesday, when I was about to just file a missing package report, it finally got delivered – but by then it had kind of had its thunder thoroughly stolen for the moment by the certificates and the graded coins coming back.

    I had also ordered some more 7-coin sets of the Bolivar Fuertes coins from a dealer in Utah I got Zimbabwe coins from. I'd bought 5 sets of these from a dealer in Turkey before I saw that this Utah dealer also had them - and at a lower price if buying several sets. I decided to order more just to have some from another dealer / source.
    The coins from the Utah dealer are very nice and may well be better than the others from Turkey. I have all the coins labeled with what dealer they came from. It will be interesting if all the "Best" ones we pick are from the new sets when we finally go through these.
    I've been holding off on going through these with Shandy in part because I wanted to have them all together first - or as close to it as possible. But I've felt the desire and need to start moving on these growing as the Zimbabwe submission moved closer to being done and home - time to fire off the next round, right? And that this point I really have almost every thing I wanted and needed and I don’t feel like holding things up for that 2nd Ukranian package that may never come. So if it ever does I’ll just do what I did with the many, many waves of Zimbabwe coins – pick the best of each group and compare the best of each group against each other until I arrive at 1 coin to submit.
    I’m yet to find someone offering either just the 50 Bolivar Fuertes coins or sets that include the 50 Bolivar Fuertes coin at a price I consider reasonable for these. The jury is still out on what to do about that and I may just proceed without them for now, just like I initially proceeded without the $2 and $5 coins with Zimbabwe, and proceeded the 2nd time with Zimbabwe without a new / better $10 and $25 coin. Sometimes you just have to make progress where you can and wait for better opportunities on other things.
    This may be one of the more egregious cases of “scope explosion” I’ve ever pulled on myself. What started as getting 1 of the new 2021 Digital Bolivar coins has turned into:
    -          5 Denominations of the Original Bolivar from the 1980s.
    -          5 higher denominations of the original bolivar from the early 2000s.
    -          7 denominations of the Bolivar Fuertes coins from ~2007
    -          3 later denominations of the Bolivar Fuertes added ~2016
    -          2 denominations of the Bolivar Soberano
    -          3 denominations of the “Digital” Bolivar
    25 denominations spanning 3 redenominations and 4 currencies over about 40 years… Yeah… So much for one little coin… I’m a lunatic, but you knew that already.

    I'm thinking I’ll try to get these out with some 500L coins in May - if I can convince Shandy to let me get away with it. We cracked open a couple of Italian Franklin Mint sets the other day for a 1983 and 1987 500L for that set. The 1987 looked great once I got it out but the 1983 looked a little disappointing once we got to see it bare. So now I’m looking into a couple of options on trying to get another, hopefully better, 1983.
    I also found a seller offering what they described as “Gem Uncirc” $10 Zimbabwe coins for the first time. So, I ordered a few of those, which should be arriving any day now and I’m hoping for good things. If those look good I’ll probably add that to the Italian coins and the Venezuela coins if and when those go out to resolve one of the last major weaknesses of the Zimbabwe set.
  25. Revenant
    I was gone all night at a professional function. I finally got home around 9:00, my son was already in bed. My mother-in-law stayed with them all evening while I was gone so Shandy wouldn't be alone, just in case.
    Maybe 5 minutes after my mother-in-law left, less than half an hour after I got home Shandy started bleeding. We went to the hospital. She was having contractions she couldn't feel and there was no way to stop the bleeding with the contractions and so she's in the OR now and I'm waiting. The surgery will take about 4 to 7 hours, maybe longer.
    29 weeks and 2 days. Didn't quite make it to 30 weeks but ya get what ya get.
    Now just a lot a waiting, and I'm a pacer.

    Update 2/13:
    To my unending surprise the doctors came out in less than an hour and said the placenta had detached and there was no acreta like they'd thought. Instead of a 5+ hour operation it ended up taking about 2. They didn't have to do a hysterectomy but we went ahead and had her tubes tied. We will not be tempting fate again after this - all the risk factors would be higher next time. She seems to be recovering relatively well so far but I'm expecting Thursday / Friday to be bad days as some of the pain killers from the operation wear off.
    The baby was born at 11:55 on 12/12 and weighed a little north of 3 pounds. He's doing well relatively speaking and they haven't had to intubate him but it's still a possibility. He wasn't given steroids in the days leading up to the birth because we had no warning so his lungs are not as prepared as we would have preferred. He will likely spend about 8 weeks in the NICU. The place he's in right now is a Level III NICU, for babies born mostly before 30 weeks - There is a Level IV, for so-called "micro-premies" but those are mostly born at 23-25 weeks, at 29 weeks, Samuel has several substantial advantages over that group.
    Thanks for all the well wishes. We'll probably know a lot better how he's doing after he's made it to 72 hours old.
     
    Update 2/14
    Well, you always hope your kid will defy the odds but they usually don't. Sam had to be intubated today because he was wearing himself out too much just trying to breathe. He's also dealing with some low blood-pressure issues. All of this was stuff they told us to expect that was probably coming. They can warn you all they want in advance but it's still going to suck to hear that it's happening.
     
    Update 2/16
    Well, I guess it's a good news - bad news kind of morning. We went to bed last night knowing something seemed wrong but not knowing what. The doctors suspected he might be getting pneumonia.
    As it turns out, he doesn't have pneumonia, but he has had intraventricular hemorrhaging in his brain. Grade 4 (the worst) on one side. Grade 2 on the other. No way of knowing what, if any, consequences that will have for him. 
    2/16b: He's showing high bilirubin so they have him on the lights for jaundice. After hearing about the brain bleeding this just seems so mundane.

    Update 2/17
    Shandy was discharged late yesterday and we spent the night at home with our soon-to-be-3-year-old for the first time since the birth.
    Today leaves me with more hope than yesterday for the first time in a while. The bilirubin levels are down and they've taken off the lights for it. He's breathing 21% O2 air and taking only 30-45 breaths per minute now. In the past they've had to have him on 40+% O2 air and he was still fighting for breath with a respiration rate in the 70s or higher. This is the most peaceful and relaxed I've seen him in that regard. His increased struggles to breathe, in combination with the unusual way he was holding his arms straight out and away from his body were some of the first signs that something was wrong which lead to the diagnostic tests for the bleeding in the brain. Today he's sleeping and resting with his arms bent and brought in to his body and face - much more natural and relaxed looking.
    I'm adding a picture from yesterday when he was under the lights. I'll see if I can get and share a picture of him today later.

    Update on 2/19.
    I think this is going to be the last time I update this post and I'll just include comments as appropriate in other entries moving forward. Sam will be a week old as of midnight tonight.
    His improvement has continued into this morning. His sodium levels, which were low, have come back up. The bilirubin lights have been on and off recently but they're back on for now. His heart and lungs continue to do well with no signs of new / additional bleeding recently. They think he'll be extubated today and put back on the CPAP. They're going to start feeding him milk again because they're liking the belly sounds they're hearing. So he seems to be doing well and out of most immediate danger.
     
    Update on 2/22:
    Couldn't resist one more:
    On 2/20, with the ventilator out (and he took to it well so he hasn't had to be intubated again) we got to hear him crying for the first time. It sounds a little like a small puppy honestly.
    On 2/21, Shandy got to hold him for the first time.

    On 2/22, I got to hold him for the first time.