Revenant

Sounds like you made out like a bandit and like dollar coins are a nono for that.

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.

So Ben randomly pops up with the fact that he wants a "penny sorter," which my brain interprets to mean one of those automatic coin sorting and rolling machines. I hadn't thought of those in years probably but him saying this reminded me of the fact that I used to see those in Walgreens and other places as a kid. I always really wanted one and thought they would be so cool, but I could just never justify it (or talk my mom into it) and so I always just sorted, counted and rolled by hand. To this day I've never owned one. But the whole thing and the memories brought an immediate smile to my face. Ben wanted to use my phone's Amazon app to look at some/ shop for one, just like he likes to for toys so we looked together. It looks like they no longer make ones like the ones that I used to want as a kid - makes sense after 20-25 years that the designs have moved on / progressed. Before we started shopping for and laying down a lot of money from savings to buy the new house I probably would have talked to Shandy and maybe gotten one for $25 for a laugh. But, Ben has been acting more than slightly spoiled lately with his toy demands and the house purchase IS burning through a lot of money. So at this point I'm just not interested in buying something we 100% do not need and which is just going to sit around until I have to pack it up to move in 2 months. The other thing is this kid already has like 3 piggy banks / coin banks and he really just does NOT need another bank at home. In our increasingly cashless society I sometimes wonder how many kids still get piggy banks? But these things must still be common / popular enough if they're still being offered for sale in so many varieties.

The mistake I make is being lazy and letting her handle the insurance, which leads to questions. Lol

See, now I just randomly want a 5 lb copper bar. It would go well with my 1 kilo silver bar. 🤣 A lot cheaper though.

Inspection went well very well. The house is in great shape. We just waived the last 3 days of our option period to help the sellers. At this point, barring an act of God, we plan to move forward with the purchase, but we can't close until around the end of May and, with the leaseback, we may not be in the house until July or August. We could be in in June, if they can get their purchase closed on, which is why we agreed to end the option early to help them, but I'm not going to hold my breath in this market. So It's going good, it's just going to be hard to put up with 2 months of constant dreaming about a house we're not in yet.

Sadly there is no one left, born in the 20th century, who is not old enough to drink. That's painful. Anyway... What usually got me as a babe was age and size, first size and then age. I loved looking at a few old silver dollars as a kid. Which may be why silver dollars and 1 oz silver NCLT was such a grab for me early on. I'll probably never have a major collection of Morgans and Peace Dollars - especially by registry standards - but I will always keep some. But I'm also learning as I go along that I'm more of a type collector than someone that focuses on a series. I don't know that value was something that explicitly factored into my thinking but I loved the idea or REAL silver.

As part of the planning our home purchase my wife asked me what the value of my coin collection was. I have rarely heard such shock in her voice or seen disbelief on her face when I 1) gave her an honest answer and 2) backed it up with hard numbers. The main driver of it is, of course, one small box of coins that I've recently referenced in another entry. I had to remind Shandy that she let me purchase 2 new gold coins, which added about $1,100 to it, just a month or two ago. And she's seen it all and she's seen me buy a lot of it so I don't know why it shocked her but I guess it has just crept up on her with time and the recent increase in the value of gold and silver. Somewhat to my surprise, my one gold coin has gone to QC at NGC already. The 10G coins went to QC first / faster but they're being re-holdered, not graded. The two CW tokens are still just "Scheduled." The entry on one of the tokens in the submission tracker has me scratching my chin and wondering if I'm going to get a nasty or unpleasant surprise. I guess we'll see. I'm still waiting to get a sale / the deal I want on some Zimbabwe coin sets. My bond coins have arrived yesterday but I haven't even gotten to open them yet because this week has been a bit nuts.

You can delete / hide I think. Just not make targeted edits.

Having joined the Collector's Society and started this Journal in mid-2007 I definitely feel like I've witnessed the site and the journal feature of the site "evolve" over time but I've been enjoying 1 new feature lately now that I'm gaining an understanding of how it works... the new Category feature. When I first rejoined / became active again around 2016/2017 I had to get used to the new system but I very much remember being disappointed by the fact that the new system only let me have 1 journal - I wanted to have one specially about the 10G set and one for other things. The category feature actually fixes this. Now I can have a "Gold" category and a "Family" category and, my favorite, my "Random Nonsense" category and I click and see just my posts in that category. I loved this so much I went back a while ago and added category labels to a bunch of old posts that didn't have them as far back as I could. Another feature I've become aware of over time - it seems that after 1 year you can no longer go back and edit entries, just hide them. This one us a bit bittersweet as I has typos!!! So many typos. When I see them I will often try to fix them. Now, past the one year threshold, I see that is quite impossible. Sadness... I've known for a while that I couldn't edit the legacy journals from. The old system for a while now but hadn't realized the old ones locked up after a year. Of course, in my ignorance of the categories and how they work I've made quite a mess for myself on my PMG journal which I will now need to try to fix at some point while I still can... but, fortunately, that one is much smaller than this one.

Yeah. We're getting it for only about $2,000 over ask, but with $5,000 in closing costs, almost unheard of in this market, at a cost of about $120/sq ft. All super reasonable for a newer house that has never flooded with a great new elementary school. But it's all because of the negotiating power that leaseback condition gives us. Even kinda bad houses here are going under contract in just a day or two, even at prices I'd normally call very steep. We got lucky on this one.

Before CoVID and before having 2 kids, one of whom has CP, I probably would have assumed the same but these days I find that things happen as and when I can make them if they aren't essential.

Maybe so, but that would probably just create a backlog of demand and once they opened up again they'd just get slammed again. Just my 2 cents. People can also do what I somewhat accidentally did - fill out the forms and have them ready to go and leave them sitting on my desk for 3 months. Then they get sent in - freeze or no.

We have 3 or 4 pre-approvals from shopping around for rates and the house is only 7 years old so I don't expect it to need much work. This should be pretty easy. Should be. We'll see.

There's a thread elsewhere where someone has an NGC graded ancient forgery. I think it's interesting the NGC encapsulated it as a "genuine counterfeit" essentially from Roman times and not a modern fake.

I agree they come out good here. Just saying - it amazes me how often people come to these boards specifically to trash the company that pays to support these boards. I don't understand what they expect this to accomplish and why they feel the need to escalatea complaintso. Every time I have ever contacted NGC privately with a problem they have taken care of me without putting them on blast.

Wow. I go away for a few days to do some house shopping and things get interesting. I would feel for Joe and sympathize if he was a little more humble and less libelous in his statements. It's always amazing when people find or buy (at super low prices) these coins that are really rare and valuable and don't seriously question the authenticity of this stuff. It really goes to show you how the counterfeiter and con men continue to make a living. This whole thing has me thinking of that time I looked on that WISH website and they were selling Morgan dollars for $1 and people were posting about how happy they were with their new "coin." But... yeah. Props to NGC. They are the most tolerant host I think I've ever seen. If someone called me a thief in my own house they'd be getting hit with the door on the way out.

I'm guessing it's similar to "contemporary fake" or "contemporary forgery." It IS old / ancient, but its fake and not a real coin. It is a counterfeit from Roman times. Interesting in its own right IMO.

We put in an offer on a house on 4/20! We started negotiating on 4/19 but the seller didn't accept until 4/20 and that's when we put in the bid contract - which is the only thing that matters under Texas law. We're still waiting on confirmation that they have signed it to put the house under contract after most of yesterday was lost to hashing out a minor issue in the draft of the contract we signed and submitted on 4/20, so we re-signed and resubmitted yesterday and... fingers crossed. We found out at like 10 PM last night that the seller agent was blaming the delay on a new assistant and even the sellers were texting her repeatedly wanting to know where the papers were. It's a great house. We're getting a great deal on it given the state of the market. The catch is they want a leaseback that extends up to potentially 7/31. So even if we close in May we may not be living there until August - which might not be the worst thing for my submissions? It is on the higher end of our range though, so I expect the coin and currency budget to take a hit for the rest of the year. I may not do much other than these planned low-cost submissions with the grading credits. We’ll see. Life has surprised me before, even recently. I got the confirmation from NGC late last night that my coins are in the system. I can now stop worrying in a paranoid fashion that my coins went to the wrong box and disappeared into the ether. That feels good. My flat rate boxes arrived so I hope to send in my checks to PMG soon and my bond coins are on their way from Europe! Huzzah! Still waiting on a sale to go back and get the older issues. I expect that to pop up some time next month. In the mean time I got some cotton gloves for handling the when they arrive. But, it feels like there’s a lot of waiting to do right now… waiting on others on the house, on the submission, on the bond coins to arrive, waiting and holding out for a sale… I'm continuing to try to sell some old collectable miniatures I've had since I was in high school. I'm being spurred on by the desire to get rid of these before an up-coming move and I'd like to use the cash to maybe fund some possible coin and note buys, or maybe just do something else more fun than looking at these sit and collect dust in my house. I'm increasingly running into people that want to buy them for $10 after shipping when it costs $4-8 just to ship them - to say nothing of the cost of boxes, packing material, tape, or printing mailing labels. I've just had to tell people, "Sorry, but I'm not here to just make work for USPS." If I can't make money on this I'd rather just let Ben play with them until they break or put them to the curb. I don't need the money that bad. The really funny ones are those that will say "I can get it for $10 on eBay." "Then why are you bothering me? Go get it there!" But I really just don't know how those eBay sellers are making any money - especially after you add in fees. It just isn't worth it to pocket a buck after all that time and effort. But maybe some are harder up for cash than I am? Edited to add: They signed and the house is under contract now, and it looks like our upfront costs and payments will be lower than expected/ feared because of some tax credits we didn't know about (homestead).

It's rough and it sucks but I'm notnsure it has an easy fix. It's been crazy times and CoVID hit them like everyone. They have to protect their employees and maintain their social license to operate in an industry that requires them to be physically present to look at very valuable, secured items in facilities that probably were not originally designed for social distancing. And once you get really behind it can be very hard to catch back up.

Unfortunately a rim dent is a rim dent, no matter where or when it occurred and NGC has only your word for that. But PMD is still PMD, with "mint" in this case meaning striking, not the building.

Well, mine I think were.delovered on the 5th or 6th... so... getting closer!! 🤣

It's set up as a type set and I like it that way. I can't imagine there's interest in much more than that. I personally don't have interest in date sets or anything like that. Just representative pieces.

I said in a recent post that I’d be looking to buy some Zimbabwe coins from a dealer in the US that I’ve used a lot and get those submitted. Then, to my surprise, when I went to order, I found that they’d upped their prices and upped their minimum order from $50 to $100. Yeah, they offer free shipping, but, sheesh. Let me have the option to pay the shipping for a smaller order. I wanted to order 2 sets of coins and some notes for about $55. I had not wanted to or planned to spend $100 and buy 3-4 sets… So, I just didn’t. Having looked into this more, I’m finding that I may not be able to get those 10-coin sets in uncirc. condition anywhere else for less than about $25/set, where with that dealer I can get them for about $20/set - $18 if I wait for one of their frequent sales. Also, I increasingly like the idea of getting 3 sets, getting one graded and keep 2 raw – one for each boy. So, I might just hold my nose and put in a larger order soon. And now I feel a bit silly for getting such a stick up my butt about it, but it didn’t feel right at the time and so I’ll stand by that choice. While I’m changing up my plans and waiting on a sale – probably a few weeks, Mother’s day and Father’s day will probably shake out something – I decided to grab a bunch of the 2014 bond coins. I’m going to try to submit these all together and have a bunch of them labeled -001 to -015 on the same invoice – an idea I’m stealing from Fenntucky Mike’s comment on my Traveler Check plans. I found a seller offering 5 sets of 5 Bond Coins for $28 so I ordered that and used my eBay bucks – 25 coins for about $23.50 after my bucks. Not bad. I’ll keep 4 sets Raw probably and organize 1 10-coin set and 2 5-coin Bond coin sets into a 20-coin album page and one day Ben and Sam will each get one, I think. Even if I pull that off though I don’t think they’ll be listed from -001 to -015 in the set just because of the… slightly odd? way NGC lists / orders the slots and includes the bond coins and the fact that there’s a couple of varieties / designs of some denominations… It would make more sense to me to have the Bond Coins listed together at the end. This may be worth chasing up with NGC to see if they’d re-order the slots. Maybe I need to try to just get them all together first… but I need to get moving on placing that order and getting these soon, I think. Getting lower tier things through seems to be taking a while lately and I’d ideally like to have more than one coin in my Zimbabwe coin set for 2021. That dime did the heavy lifting for 2020 but that’s an awfully lonely looking coin. I think that would help make for a cool set. My working title for the coin set is going to be “The Early Victims of Hyperinflation,” or “Extinct Due to Hyperinflation” a reference to the fact that Zimbabwean coins went the way of the Dodo a lot sooner / faster than their notes did, as coins always do. I’ve gone ahead and done the paperwork to submit the Zimbabwe traveler’s checks (P-15 to P-20) – without waiting on P-40 and P-45 – because I just don’t want to keep holding these up. I’m going to ship them in large BCW top loaders for protection and I’ve requested / ordered some small flat rate USPS boxes, which I think should be pretty much the perfect size for this job and the small coin submissions I’m hoping to do soon. I’m submitting all 12 checks but doing each set of P-15 to P-20 on separate forms so they’ll be two sets numbered -001 to -006 and I’ll get to fill two competitive sets with them. The best of each will go in the “Gradually, Then Suddenly” and I might make a signature set will all ~13 I’ll have at that point. Between getting some orders placed, having flips to put coins in already and having shipping supplies coming it feels good to be rapidly making several material steps towards getting these things done and actually using the 2020 grading credits, unlike the 2019 one. But… 2020 was just rough. But I do also feel it was a personal failure to let that drag on for months while my anxiety over putting those coins in the mail quietly got the better of me. The box with the 10G coins was delivered to NGC on 4/5 and their latest update says they’re opening the mail from 4/1 and 4/2 presently. So I’m hoping they’ll show in the system soon.

DS9 is far and away my favorite ST series, but it owes a lot of the world building that TNG did to set the stage for it. I'm also a very big fan of Babylon 5, which is a great show but it suffers from a weak first Season in much the same way TNG does, in part because it has to do a lot of its own world building and so it starts pretty slow.