Revenant

Well, when I was posting last time Sam was napping and we were getting ready to take him to Urgent Care hoping all the grabbing of his head and crankiness was an ear ache. It wasn't an ear ache. We had a shunt revision today and it looks like his shunt catheter, which we already knew had shifted, had nearly completely failed and it wasn't draining fluid and pressure effectively. He should hopefully be discharged tomorrow for a 1-2 week light recovery. We're told he "beat the odds" because most kids need revisions before this. I don't know why doctors seem to think this is comforting. And, obviously, I still haven't boxed up that shipment to NGC. 😅🤣 Life just isn't that calm. I stay busy when I'm stressed though. I don't stay still or idle much. All the laundry is done. All the dishes are clean. Christmas trash is handled, drive way is cleaned up. Only one parent gets to be with him at the hospital so she gets to come home to a clean place while I care for 4-year old Ben, who comes in to sleep with me because he misses his brother at night in the room they share. 2020 just couldn't go quietly.

Yeah... Pretty tongue-in-cheek to list it but it bridges the gap between New Year's Day and the Anniversary so I'll take it!

My wife and I are coming up on a pretty significant day for us and I've joked that it caps off a sequence of special Fridays. 12/25 - Christmas 1/1 - New Year's Day 1/8 - The NGC/PMG Awards announcement 1/15 - Our 5th Wedding Anniversary. One of the things my wife has talked very fondly of the entire time I've known her is her memories of the time they spent in Italy when she was young. I was finishing up putting her father's old coin bag in flips today (I'll have to work on labeling all of them later, but they're in flips now) and I couldn't help but smile at all of the Italian ones in particular because Italy always brings a smile to her face. I got her a full set of Italian Crystal glassware for Christmas - Champagne flutes, wine glasses, highball glasses, double old fashioned glasses - all in the same pattern. She's been rather happy, using the Champagne flutes to make us Mimosas and using the new wine glasses for wine at dinner and after the kids are in bed. She's really excited to have the champagne flutes for NYE. She really wants to make a trip there with me one of these days and so we'll have to make that happen one day. A gold Italian 20 Lira from the 19th Century is high on the list of coins I want to add to my world gold collection for this same reason.

P-91 is the most zeros ever printed on a note but I don't think its the highest denomination. In the 1940s Hungary printed notes that were I think 1 million or 100 million "Bilpengo." Their currency unit had been the "pengo." A "bilpengo" was a "Billion pengo," and I THINK at the time they were using a now antiquated meaning for Billion wherein a Billion to them was a Trillion for us. They used "Milliard" for Billion. So, if I read up on all this right, "1 million bilpengo" was "1 million trillion pengo." They just didn't print that.

That's awesome! Glad it's doing some good and getting used like that. It captured my imagination 12 years ago and I've never forgotten it.

Sorry in advance for what is probably a silly question that's answered somewhere I haven't found yet but.. I'm trying to get my act together and send in some coins for Reholder and the system gave me labels to print for the coins on the invoice, but I'm a little confused on how to deal with them. The coins are in NGC holders and not 2x2s so there's no "pocket" to put these in. Should I just attach the label with a little tape (see below)?

The part that worries me is PMG still has no new registry, just the old one. They still haven't announced any plans or timeline to make one, but they're increasingly dropping the old system. I like the PMG side too - especially with my Zimbabwe hyperinflation set.

I think they just had their hands full and it was a lower priority item to have a counter. If you use the old site like I do often it may also just be that they're supporting Collector's Society less and less in favor of the new Registry.

It's almost always the first Friday in December.

I find that I quite enjoy writing about things I'm knowledgeable about and which I enjoy, which is probably good considering writing reports is a big part of my job. I 100% agree with you that none of what I write is art - I often find I'm rather self-indulgent, going off on tangents sometimes that I'm sure many don't care about and digging into details. I do a lot of dialing myself back sometimes. I hold the record for the longest report where I work, clocking in at over 2400 pages - but I only had about 400 of that. Most of the rest was automatically generated results / data outputs that had to be documented in an appendix. I hope your sets do well this year! If not, there's next year!

Ah.... well, nuts. Thanks. Yes. It looks a lot like the type A watermark used until 1994.

In late December / early January I picked this Zimbabwe coin up as a kind of extension or part of my Zimbabwe note set. I added it to a set in the registry and it became a #1 ranked set with 1 coin and a total score of 16 points. We're after the awards cut-off now and its still #1 and I think it's going to get a "Best in Category" this year, with a total score of 16 points. This has me wondering what the lowest scoring set to ever win a "Best in Category" is / was.

When shipping a submission to NGC do most of you use bubble wrap or packing paper or something different to pack the box? Any reasons? Any horror stories?

Again, I'm very sorry to hear about your loss. We all deal with this stuff in our own ways. I can't imagine having lost a life partner heading into this year, when person-to-person contact has been at a premium for many of us. I really poured myself into my Zimbabwe note set in 2019 because work was slow and I needed something to focus on that was more positive with Sam's birth. It sounds like you've chosen to focus on a new business, which is / can be good and positive and constructive.I know my wife is the first person I usually talk to about my collections and new purchases I could see that becoming bittersweet and having pangs associated with it if I lost her / that aspect of it. Keep trucking, man. Maybe you'll find your way back to it and find joy in this again after some time.

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.

I think with most things, especially things like the Registry, past a certain point you just have to hope that the vast majority of people are going to mostly want to comply with the rules and act in an open and honest way. It is shocking to think about how many things in our lives ultimately depend on and assume a level of voluntary compliance.

Sam is obsessed with Goldfish, and shoving them in his mouth all day. He's started saying "Ga" for for Goldfish when he wants them. This means he's working on learning to say "gold," which is a lovely word if you like coins IMO. Meanwhile Ben has recently cropped up with "poins" and telling me he took my "poins." I had thought we'd gotten past this and he'd figured out "coins," but it has made a comeback recently. My wife doesn't want me correcting him too much because she thinks its adorable. I think in its origins is the word "points" and him having trouble with the t sound, but he is definitely using it to refer to coins. I had the thought again last night about trying to buy and submit some Zimbabwean bond coins to make a registry set of them to go with my notes. I had thought about this early in the year but got distracted by the pandemic. The thing that strikes me about it in my shopping is I can't easily find sellers selling sets of them in the US. The sellers I'm finding are in China, Bangladesh, Ukraine... I'm wondering if there aren't many collectors / people interested in these in the US. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Enjoy the family if you can though. I have a note coming that is supposed to arrive in the mail Monday the 30th. I have a description pre-written for it and my fingers crossed because it would be a very nice last minute addition to my 3rd dollar set.

Looks like some of your pictures in the 1936 set and the 1940 set aren't displaying right. I don't know how it looks to you but you might want to check. Sometimes images break and sometimes you get upload errors.

Somehow I knew what this was about when I saw that title (not the specific sets but what you were eligible for). You're clearly doing this wrong though. You're supposed to put all of your hopes and dreams into one set / basket and set yourself up for disappointment. The discussion about reconfiguring your penny set is interesting given the conversation we've been having in the Registry forum.

Facebook has that thing now when it will show you old posts and photos from years ago and I'm always amazed by how much he has changed in 1, 2 and 3 year timeframes. He is as big as his 7 year cousin and it's hard sometimes to remember he's only 4, but mentally / developmentally he's definitely still only 4.

Thank you! I don't think I have heard of them. When I hear Wizard I normally think of a company I used to buy comics from. I may have to look into them the next time I need something. Thanks for that. We got a few mixed messages over the weekend. They initially were going to do a revision and were prepping him for surgery and then an attending put the cabosh on it. We thought his shunt had slipped further and that his ventricles had enlarged further but what we didn't realize was they were comparting to his scans from 2019 and it is unmoved and his sizes are stable when compared to his scan from earlier in 2020. So, while the shunt has slipped and the placement isn't as good as it could be, he seems okay for now and behaviorally / developmentally he seems to be doing fine. Which is why they aren't concerned enough to do anything for now. Yeah, he stopped talking and responding to us for 20 minutes at home but they didn't see that and it was just 1 event that, even if it was a real thing, might not be associated with the shunt / intercranial pressure, so they're not going to jump to a shunt revision. So I guess we'll see how he continues to do. So, really no change from before, he just decided to scare the mess out of us.

Well, we got the negative Covid test from my Nephew late Friday, but by then my wife and Sam were already at the ER because Sam gave us the scare of our lives when he stopped talking and we were worried he might be having seizures or some other issue and might have shunt failure. Two nights at the hospital later, short on a lot of sleep, we came back home on Sunday after a day of observation saying, "we'll watch for now, move up some of his other tests and appointments and see if we see any more concerning behavior." The doctors don't want to do a shunt revision for now based on what they're seeing on the scans and one possible incident because they feel that, once you start doing revisions, you tend to just get more revisions. So, one of my original goals for this weekend was to go to Hobby Lobby to get some 2x2 flips and more pages and start putting those coins from the father-in-law in flips and organizing them with grandpa's old coins (because some of them are from the same countries in different decades) and keep them for the boys. I don't really like doing Hobby Lobby but Michael's doesn't stock coin collecting supplies from what I've seen. Obviously I went to neither store this weekend but this did lead me to (in some of my tons of time waiting around this weekend) to find the BCW store on Amazon and at this point I think I'm going to just order some stuff from them to get it done.

I think you could make a new set up to Dec 3rd or 4th (before the cutoff time) and still win. There's one case I know of where someone threw a set together a week before the cut-off and won.