Revenant

I don't mind the week it takes to come back in the mail usually. If I was waiting on USPS at this point I'd know the grades and I'd have my answer. My curiosity and angst would be largely satisfied.

I think I was mostly doing okay on the patience until they'd been in grading over 2 weeks. Oh well. I'm gonna keep waiting and hope something finally happens this week. But like I said in the post, it was a terrible end to the week - I've even had to replace batteries in both cars in a week - and this is just one more thing adding to the pile.

2nd test came back negative, so it's back to school tomorrow, until the next exposure/ scare.

I guess CCG and NGC need to advertise this better. https://shop.collectiblesgroup.com/collections/coins

Throw out the trash and put the real ones in?

Yeah. They hold 20. I don't really love mixed boxes and try to avoid them, but I've also started a number of aborted and ill thought out sets / efforts over the years and have 2 boxes that are essentially full of just random stuff I've picked up over the years on a whim that never went anywhere. The issue of multiple boxes for a set is a problem but it's something you hit on any large set. The Zimbabwe Note collection - Small as those pmg note holders are - is still split between 3 boxes and barely fits in 3 because it involves over 100 notes / checks now.

I like them well enough. I haven't found anything I like more. I also have like 18 of them now so maybe I just feel stuck / committed.

Shipping on 5 of them to Texas is quoted at $13.31 to me. So 5 would be $53.31 shipped, which is less than the $60 you'd pay MCM and way less than the $15-20/each most places charge. The main question is how many you're buying. I just buy 5-6 at a time when I buy and slowly fill them up, even if it takes me a while.

Doesn't NGC/CCG sell these directly for $8? You have to pay shipping but if you're willing to buy several it works well. I think after shipping you can get 5 boxes for $50 buying direct.

That and it sounds like all the ANA submissions went to the front of the line / skipped the line to grading. My coins were marked as received- clearing the mail room - on 6/24 and were scheduled for grading on 7/7 - both well before your submission in August. Based on the listed turn around times when I submitted, mine should have been done and coming home by the day you handed yours in.

I don't know what it is. I'm not sure if some of these questions assume 1) NGC has techno wizards working for them that can magically draw data from all over the place, 2) they have vast armies of people sitting around to check and update this stuff or 3) NGC and PCGS don't dislike each other nearly as much as they seem to and they're happy to partner to make the NGC registry better.

Well, no grades yesterday. So that’s three weeks almost / 13 working days in “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging” without getting grades back. When the submission arrived on 6/7/21 or 6/8/21 the listed turnaround was 49 working days and the coins have now been at NGC for 65 or 66 working days as of Monday. And I really don’t care if the turnaround now is 85 working days - it was 49 when mine arrived, it was 49 for over a month of the time they’ve been there, and it was only later raised to 61, and we’re past even that. But that 49 is the thing I’m scoring against. So, I had a nice mad going on about this yesterday - bordering on a small temper tantrum - partially because yesterday had become one of those days when you’re just hating life and mad at the world and these grades coming back and having ANOTHER weekend without knowing was just the icing on the cake of grinding my gears. We found out on Thursday night that Ben’s friend had tested positive for CoVID. He came down with symptoms late Monday, and this kid had been playing with Ben all day on Sunday and had had dinner with us Sunday night. So, neither kid could go to school or daycare yesterday. So, what was supposed to be my Friday off turned into accomplishing none of the things I’d hoped to knock out in and out of the house, 2.5 hours in urgent care trying to test a non-cooperative 5-year-old, and trying to contain the 2 year old and the 5 year old - who are on a serious mommy--obsession-kick - while Shandy tried to work and have meetings. So yesterday sucked. Hard. Yesterday was rough. Today… today is better. Life feels kinder today. It’s a little easier to smile today. I’m still kind of salty and having a bit of a mad-after-glow on this, but life is better today. And… we’re doing much better than they are across the street. Ben’s rapid test was negative and he’s feeling just fine 6 days after the exposure. We’re waiting on the PCR test to come back and confirm negative but at this point I’m not terribly concerned. We aren't going anywhere this weekend and we're hoping the results come back Sunday night so Ben can go to school Monday, but I'm fully expecting a negative result at this point. Across the street, the 5-year-old and the 3 year old baby sister and the father are now all sick, and so we’re dropping off coloring books, and fever reducers… and chocolate. Good chocolate. That poor mother… On top of everything we have a tropical wave bearing down on us that may cause localized flooding and trap us all at home for a few days even if we manage to clear the test. Getting back to the submission a bit… I feel like this is one of the cases were the submission tracker works just well enough to be a tease while also not being terribly helpful some days. In the past I’ve seen things be finalized and shipped within about a week (4-7 working days) of hitting “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging.” In that situation it makes sense to lump all those together and not split them out. In the case of this submission, they’ve been sitting there for 13 working days, and it just becomes a tease after having been conditioned by past experience to expect results fast after they hit that stage. It begs the question “what’s the hold-up?” but I’m thinking it must be the grading part of that situation, because these crazy-long turnaround times are ONLY hitting World Modern and World Economy. If the backlog was in encapsulation or imaging, I would expect that to hit more across the board and hit US modern and US economy too but that is not what we’re seeing. It has had me wondering lately if there could be something wrong that they can’t talk about - like one or more of the world graders being sick. But, if it is that, I’ll hopefully never know, because they’d never be able to discuss that with us. The only way I could see that coming to light is if some poor soul died and they made and article honoring them and absolutely no one wants that. I keep telling myself that I just need to just stop checking this and just wait for the emails saying they’re done to hit my inbox one evening, but it’s hard. The tease is very real, I’ve been waiting for 3 months, and I just really want to finally know how they did. My worst nightmare is I’m just going to have very disappointing grades come back after all this angst and all this waiting and the whole thing is just going to come down to one massive bitter pill. But, disappointing grade results and long waits are far from the worst things in life. Also: Coinsandmedals - I blame you and your fancy-smancy Early Bird multi-holder crazy-complicated submission for this. This is clearly your fault - holding up my dirt-simple modern submission. You should feel bad. I hope life is treating you well and we get to hear how those did soon - hopefully he can split those off and get them shipped independently of that modern submission or nobody is going to know how those multi-holders made out until December! Lesson learned for all of us! Never shackle and Early Bird to a Modern to save a few dollars on shipping! Just pay the money!

Huh, someone really will buy / collect anything... But... I collect stamp cancelled Zimbabwean traveller's checks - some of which are actually stamped "waste." My house probably has too many windows for throwing rocks.

I would say that's true of everything except the World Modern and World Economy tiers. My Zimbabwe coins have been in Grading / Encapsulation for over 2 weeks at this point. I don't know what is going on with the lower world tiers but something is broken when turnarounds get over 70-80 working days. I'm guessing they're getting higher volume than usual and / or other stuff keeps getting sent in in higher tiers and bumping back the lower stuff, or both. Side note: But that 17 has to be a typo that someone was trying to put a 71 in for. Which is a bit hilarious.

Well, I'd really thought that after my Z coins hit grading on Tuesday of last week I'd get grades this week almost for sure and I'd be getting to post about the results. Sadly, this was not the case - I'm still waiting. But hopefully they'll finish soon. But I won't see grades before Tuesday now with Labor Day coming up. Gosh... I'm really wanting to know the results and hoping to not be massively disappointed. This is dragging on and turning into a nail-biter! In the mean time, I thought I'd take a minute and share some artsy nonsense with everyone. Most of the time when we're taking coin photos we're trying to capture the whole coin with good focus, luster and detail or trying to take pictures with a microscope to see variety identifiers. Sometimes though I like to get shots that are more meant to approach the subject more artistically and wanted to share some of those just for fun: I feel like you see a lot of similar stuff come out of NGC sometimes - when they want something to grab attention for some article or announcement.' It's fun stuff to play around with when you're bored or just want to run from life's responsibilities...

Sorry that life isn't being kind at the moment. I hope you're feeling as well as you reasonably can but "life-changing" also sounds like "long-term problem."

My coin collection and the generic silver are ultimately their own very separate animals with different purposes, but I view the stack as a hedge or alternative savings more than as an investment.

On January 18th 2021 I got the blessing from Shandy to pick up a 1 kilo silver bar. The spot price had recently come down from about $27 / oz to $25 / oz and I was able to find a Perth bar from a good dealer for $875. Relatively shortly there after the "Reddit Raiders" temporarily spiked the price to $30 / oz and you couldn't get anything physical hardly unless you were paying $35 / oz or more. Those kilo bars started going for over $1050... I guess I should have sold then... I was pretty confident at the time that the whole "silversqueeze" push wouldn't work and there'd be a pullback even though everyone was swearing that spot would just come up to close the premium gap and $35 silver was here today. Here we are about 7 months later. Silver recently hit about $23/oz even. Premiums have become... less insane. We got more of our deposit back from the old landlady than we'd expected and the wife agreed to let me put some of that into a new kilo bar - $822 this time. Cheaper than the last one by over $1.50/oz. Only about 11% over spot. It may yet drop more from here but I think sub-850 is an attractive enough price for a kilo in today's world. I do believe that in the fullness of time it will go up again but I think these guys were wrong in thinking they could force a major macroeconomic shift. I'm glad I didn't sell what I have or dump my old 2010 tube of SAEs and other rounds that Ben used to play with as a baby - those rounds are more valuable for their flaws now for me anyway. I'm also glad I just stepped back and refused to buy more. There have to be some people out there eating some ugly losses. But I made one other purchase to mark this and help me remember it: They're advertised as having about the same size (diameter) as SAEs so I bought some 40 mm air-tites for them to keep them pretty and they'll stay with the NCLT and other rounds. Not really "coins" but the closest thing to a commemorative that this mania and madness is likely to ever get - "Gamestonk and all." And these things are appropriate for the job because they are bonkers. Whoever designed this does not believe in the idea of a "field" and just crammed details and references and... stuff... into every spare bit of space on each face. I love it for what it is and find it amusing but it is ridiculous, manic, and insane - just like the craze it is about. When people shout "to the moon," how many people think about the guy from Happy Days and how many think of the old Frank Sanatra song? My wife loves the song, but I have to laugh when thinking about the fact that that song could be applied to some people in r/Silverbugs in a very different and comical way. "You are all I long for. All I worship and adore." For a while there, whenever I'd show Shandy that silver or gold were having a big up-day she'd jokingly shout "To the moon." I think the part she didn't say was, "So we can sell it all!"

I mean, plenty of grown men still play and collect Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. So maybe he moves on to M:tG, maybe not. Maybe he does what I did and do a little of all 4 - and I still own a number of M:tG cards. I think the art is generally superior to YiGiOh and beats the crud out of Pokemon but YuGiOh does have some nice art. In that regard I collected the cards for reasons similar to many of my coins but the cards lack the history / context of the coins.

I had seriously wondered a few times if you were the one that was dead in a car accident or something with the suddenness of the departure but I'm glad that you're okay. I'm sorry for your losses though. The Zimbabwe note set won "Best Presented" in 2020 and I got a journal award and credit here so expanding into the coins and filling some holes seemed like the thing to do. I've managed to buy some $2 Bond Coins and some good / better looking $5 bi-metallics. The $1 bond coins are proving harder to get at a good price so far and I think I'll have a hard time getting some of the earlier non-steel issues in good condition.

So, I was still feeling salty about those $2 and $5 bi-metallics and decided to leave a bad review on them a while ago - I left good reviews on two raw notes I'd bought that both graded well. A few days later they reply to the 5-star reviews thanking me, but I see nothing on the 2-star... The 5 stars are showing on the website, but the 2 star isn't. Three days later I finally see a reply come through saying that they tried to reach out to me but got no response... the 2-star review still isn't showing on their website even though they responded to it... As I pointed out to them, I get and see tons of emails from them - I'd gotten 4 emails that day about their flash sale. I get their emails asking for reviews on what I've bought previously. I got the emails responding to the other reviews. And yet... somehow... they claim I missed and didn't respond to the one email I've really wanted from them?? I see everything else, and nothing goes to spam - I'm sure in part because Gmail knows I actually open a lot of them - but - somehow - I didn't get that one message. They responded back saying they sent the message on the day before the other comments came back. I checked to see - not in my trash. Not in spam. Not there. I think they need to check their "drafts" folder. But I don't think they sent anything. But I do suddenly understand how - and why - those coin sets had only three 5-star reviews when I got such shabby coins and why there's never anything other than 5-star reviews on that site on anything. They must be blocking / filtering out anything that isn't 5 stars. It's a testimonial feed masquerading as a rating / review system. So, I'm never going to bother leaving a review on that site again. No one will ever read it. I did send images of those 6 coins, just because - I'm right and what they sent for those 2 denominations looks nowhere near as nice as what their website images show. It didn't really go anywhere because it was past their 30 day return window. I didn't expect anything good to come out of it, but the complaint deserved to be made. If I'd wanted a refund, I would have chosen to contact them within 30 days and instead I chose to pick what seemed worthwhile and make a smaller submission - there really aren't tons of sellers offering these coins / sets in uncirculated condition. But they promised mint and that isn't what they delivered and that deserved to be called out. Maybe I'm unfair in some of my griping here but I don't think I'm going to be buying from them anymore. I've had success buying from them in the past and had good service in the past but since 2020 every time I interact with their customer service it tends to be a disaster and they've jacked up their order minimums so much that you can't just make a small, fun purchase anymore - other dealers are just treating me better at this point - and delivering what they advertise. On a more positive note, the coins I submitted hit Grading/Encapsulation today. So maybe in another week I’ll finally know how good or bad the coins I didn’t hate did, along with the Bond Coins, which I’m very optimistic on. Seeing this helped spur me on to work a little more on my descriptions and comments for these Zimbabwean coins. I’m hoping to polish them off with comments on how well they do individually and post them up as soon as I get them - hopefully with some nice looking photos.

The move has brought us back closer to Shandy's Parents and to mine, but it has also brought me back to being close to an old game store i used to go to as a high schooler, some 16-17 years ago. Ben has been missing going to the game store by the old house - we were lucky in that it was only half a mile or so from home - so today I took him to the old card and game store I went to all those years ago. It wasn't like going to the other store used to be - in this case its still 10 miles and a 22 minute drive away but I decided to take him anyway. We won't go there as often as we might have the other place but I'll take him back sometimes. He enjoyed it. I got him 3 singles and a couple of boosters. I chatted with the kid behind the counter - a 19 year old working a summer job. Basically the same age I was the last time I was in that store. It was very strange going back there and seeing the store looking very similar to how it used to and relatively little changed from when I used to come to play. It is strange to do these things with Ben, thinking of doing them years ago with my mother, thinking about how like me he is / how like him I was, and smiling thinking that the kid will probably turn out okay, no matter how I spoil him or how he annoys me some days. In other news, the Z coin submission is STILL "scheduled for grading" after 5 weeks - and 2 months after I mailed it in. I'm starting to worry it won't be finished in time for August 19th, which was the original estimate, but I still have plenty of time for them to come home before December. Showing just how much less slammed / less busy PMG is, my submission of two notes, which was only received a week ago, is now already in "Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging." So I will probably know the results on those P-3 notes I mailed out about 2-3 weeks ago before I know the results on the coins I mailed off over 2 months ago. I went ahead and ordered a 2015 S Pf69UC set of Presidential dollars the other week and I'll probably order a 2016 3-coin set soon just to get that set closer to some semblance of completion and closer after 14 years. I'll have moved it from 4 years to 7 years represented - from ~40% to about 70% if you don't count the reverse proofs - something I am not at all sure I care about. Edited to add: Of course! Not 5 hours later he has to take all three of the singles I bought him in the car with them, puts them in a collapsible cup holder, and they all fall down and are lost in the car. No way of getting them back without taking my car apart. Of course... Because that's how things go with 5 year old kids... on one hand, "it was $5 worth of cards. Whatever." On the other hand... I'm still so annoyed.

I suspect they maxed out the allowed characters on the line, which is why you see no spaces around the "-" on that line but you do get a " - " on the next line.

Following up on my last post, just for fun. I'd left the 2018 American Innovation coin on my dresser. I picked it up and was going to take it to join the other coins. Sam was in the room and it caught his eye and he demanded that I hand it over. He proceeded to walk around with it, wave it around and look at it. I think this is one of those times when you just have to say "what the heck," and let them have it. Worst case scenario is he manages to break something I couldn't break with a hammer and I'm out about $19.

I've been talking and thinking about starting a set of the Innovation Dollars to show the boys as they get older and a seller on eBay gave me an offer for this after I watched it so I decided to bite. After shipping it cost me $20. At that price it just becomes fun impulse buy at a stressful time. I thought it was worth it to begin the journey of about 50 coins with this one. I think I will make a set of these, but in the near term I think my focus will be adding a few more presidents to that old set - I'm probably going to buy year sets of those for 2015 and/or 2016 soon. In looking at this label though, with all that information and all that color... I just couldn't help but laugh. If you look at the labels for the old fatty holders they say hardly anything usually. Just something like S$1 and a year and mint mark. Done. And you have to think they couldn't put much more on that label if they wanted too. 6 lines of information a barcode and the "American Innovation" tagline. I really like that gear / mechanical wheel graphic on the label though. I still find it odd that they kicked off this series with this one-off coin that breaks the whole pattern. One coin in a year rather than 4 and about a person and not linked to / for a state or territory. Honoring the first patent is also interesting in the context of modern times and the use / abuse of patents to lock competition out of markets and crush by litigation. That coin arrived in the Mail Monday at the old house. I didn't get a chance to get it out until this morning because we've been going so hard but I didn't want to risk it being forgotten in the mailbox. We really need to set up our mail forwarding. Anyway... Also on Monday - the really big news - Shandy got a new job!!! It has been / was a crazy week because she was having to do remote interviews and skills tests while we were packing every day and night too.. super stressful and crazy but Monday made it all worth it with the big news! So she'll be using her new home office for that and no longer doing 5 AM English lessons. We'll have offices together on one side of the house with a small bathroom between us. It's going to be great I think. We'll spend more time in the morning together with the boys. It's gonna be fantastic! The movers came today and after a lot of hours and a lot work in the heat of August almost all of our stuff is over here now. We're going back to the old place one last time tomorrow to finish getting the last of our stuff and cleaning up a bit. But tonight will be the first night in the new house. With a little child-care help from in-laws this house is and will continue to "come online" very quickly. Saturday night we'd brought a bottle of bubbly wine and apple cider with champagne flutes to celebrate. After all the unpleasantness that wrecked that evening we never opened them - it didn't feel right. But we'll get everyone over soon and pop the corks in a proper celebration of the new house. It's all coming together. One day at a time. Tomorrow's priorities are building the crib, setting up my desk so I can work Thursday and generally unboxing things as able.