Revenant

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.

Actually no. I had no clue. I haven't really been shopping for those lately with Gold prices so elevated. Of course, it looks like all of those (very highly graded) coins are PCGS graded, which wouldn't help me much here unless I crossed them.

I've been spending a lot of time over on the PMG side working on a Signature set the last couple of years, so I'm mostly just SOL on the new side for now.

Very cool! I don't really spend any of my time in the new registry. I still come at it from the Collector's Society Page. Maybe I need to start coming at it from the other end and up my game a little.

True, and, like I said, I agree it's a good idea. I just know the posts won't stop.

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.

I agree with the idea and with pinning it to the top of the page. The sad thing is, I still know we'll still get a ton of posts asking about such coins from newbies that don't read the post. Such is life. (I love people, I do, but I'm either too old or too jaded to expect too much anymore).

No. I haven't considered that and I wouldn't want to for several reasons. 1) I've only held the top spot for 4 years so far, the same length of time as the person I took it from. It's not like I've had it locked up for a decade. It's not like I'm a whale / heavy hitter and win a lot of categories here - I win 2 categories with two sets that I've put a lot of time, effort and love into.. 2) My set has twice as many coins as the #2 - which is under 50% complete. My set has the two key dates of the series. This isn't even a close competition. 3) The #2 hasn't been modified in over 8 years and has no set or coin descriptions. The 1879, which #2 doesn't have, is not rare. He could have easily gotten an NGC graded example in the last 8 years if he wanted one. The other coins in the set - the 1880, the 1885, etc - while they are less common and can be harder to get pre-graded by NGC - are common enough if you shop in the right places. The biggest problem I have with those coins is I don't want to pay a ton of money to have an unseen coin shipped to me from Europe just to have it show up looking cleaned, dipped or just straight-up ugly. If Mozin really wanted to compete with me or give me a run for my money I think he could. I passed him up 4 years ago and he hasn't tried to fight me for it. So I can't think he's too broken up over it or that he's desperately working to unseat me from the #1 spot.

So going "No tier" and "Reholder" is the right way to do this and it'd be $12/coin? (these are about $500 gold coins so they wouldn't need oversize or high value).

This thread has me wondering / trying to remember how many people I'll ticked off and how many pairs of eyes I've made roll back into heads (and how often). It's a funny thing to consider. Especially considering I was a lot more abrasive in my early and mid-20s than I am now, but I think I'm probably still pretty abrasive in my mid-30s. Oh well.

The current situation with work from home has changed the dynamics of things quite a bit. I watch Ben most days for a couple of hours in the afternoon while Shandy and the baby nap. Ben actually will come up and close my laptop sometimes when he wants to play and tell me "work is done. No more work." If I don't have a pressing deadline I'll let him get away with it. It was harder at the start of the lockdown because I had just recently started a 2 month long, $84,000 project that had me grinding away during working hours. I think you're looking at, at most, 1 generation of relevance unless its something big. If your ancestor won the Nobel prize or the medal of honor then there will be interest in keeping that in a lot of cases as significant family history. I would have been interested in getting my grandfather's diploma and Tau Beta Pi certificate because 1) I was named for him, 2) he was an engineer like me, and 3) we were both in that honor society. With other things? Your children or grand children might want it if they had a connection with you relevant to that thing, but I don't see it going past that. For example, if you worked closely with a child or grandchild to build a set and that set won an award here, I would expect that award to have interest to that grandchild, but i wouldn't expect that plaque to have meaning or value to a grandchild that had no connection to your coin collecting or that set, and I would expect that plaque to get passed down to the trashcan in the fullness of time.

I posted on 1/12/2019 about winning the 2018 Journal award and mentioned that, pretty much at the same time as I found out about that, that I'd gotten a paper accepted for publication. I didn't really go into this at the time but it was a paper co-authored with my graduate advisor - who passed away on September 11, 2018. He's the person I decided to name Sam after. I didn't know it at the time but I posted that entry exactly 1 month before Sam's surprise early birth - the "first published" date on the paper is 1 Feb 2019, just 11 days before his birthday. I found out last week that the paper is going to win a "Best In-Practice Paper" award. I'll be getting a plaque for it in the mail in about a month to a month and a half. Normally these would be given at a dinner meeting but that can't happen this year - all the meetings are canceled because of COVID-19. So I'll be getting dressed up for a suit for one of the very few times this year and taking a picture with it. I'm also going to be taking a picture with it and Sam and a picture of Sam holding it much like I did the 2019 Journal Award plaque this year - I expect Sam to try to eat the plaque again. Finding out that I won it and that this is going to be happening in the near future is necessarily a little bittersweet, thinking about the passing of my teacher 2 years ago, every thing that was going on with Shandy's health at the time I wrote that January 2019 entry and all the things that would later follow and it has me thinking about things this week. There will also be a plaque provided for him and I've reached out to his wife about mailing it to her but I can't help but acknowledge that it would mean a very different thing to her than to me and she honestly might not want another award for the man to keep in a box somewhere to eventually be tossed out by the grandkids. My advisor was a bit of a workaholic, as great men sometimes tend to be - and he had a wall / office full of awards to show for it. But I think that had some negative impacts on his marriage based on things I've heard and observed. I've often thought that I don't think I could or that I'd want to ever really be like him or achieve the kinds of things that he achieved in his professional life because it would require me to put in so much time and effort into my career that it would kill my relationship with my wife and make me miss too much of my sons' childhoods. I don't want to be that guy that's in the office at 8 AM on a Saturday every weekend. There's a joke in the oil and gas industry about being on your 3rd marriage or being divorced mostly because you're pulling 60+ hour weeks all the time and you're never home. I'd rather not be an especially high-achiever and not be a VP somewhere if it means I have something resembling a work-life balance. I always want to still be that person that works to live and doesn't live to work. While I don't want to be a workaholic and I don't want to "die at my desk" - certainly not at 63, I want to achieve, and I want my sons to see me achieve - both professionally and personally in my hobbies. I want them to see me be more than just be a parent and I want to keep that part of myself that is for me. I want my sons to see me still working for and doing things that I want that I want for me. I want to still be collecting and going to coin shows. I want to still have my cameras and be shooting. I want neither my work nor my role as a parent to become the whole of my identify and sense of self. I will grant, collecting and researching coins and currency isn't everyone's cup of tea and coin shows don't sound fun at all to a great many - you can count my wife among these - but it's interesting, fun, and mentally stimulating, and I enjoy writing about it too, if my Zimbabwe note collection and this journal are any indication. Sam is becoming increasingly verbal and he's starting to say things like "All Done" when he's done eating and "bye bye." He still isn't walking but we think it might be more of a courage issue than one of ability. He's standing while using his hands and grabbing things with increasing confidence. We're just having trouble convincing him to let go and take steps away from things he's cruising on. He feels more aggressive in his exploration than Ben though - he doesn't just try to mess with electrical outlets; he tries to rip the entire wall plate out of the wall, outlets and all.

If I want to submit some coins for re-holder would I do it like what I have shown below? (No tier, Reholder Scratch-Resistant) When I choose these options I'm noticing that the "Scratch-Resistant Holder" checkbox doesn't work. If I do the online submission form, does it matter if I fill it out and it takes a while before I actually mail out the coins? Infection levels in my area are dropping so I'm finally looking into maybe getting out a little more an maybe risking an extra trip or two to the post office (and I need to mail some things for work soon anyway) but I'm not 100% sure on the timeframe right now.

I wouldn't mind getting 1/10th ounce coins for 2016 and 2019, but they just aren't really a priority for me with my cash right now - I've been taking the hit on a new generator, a new vacuum, a new TV... Boring but necessary for the most part. She has gotten me books before but not on coins.

My birthday is coming up. I never would have thought we'd still be isolating and limiting our contact with people for 6 months and I'd be looking forward to a birthday in isolation but... here we are. This also means it's another one of those moments where my wife starts trying to figure out how she can give me a nice surprise without me knowing what it is or outright picking it myself. So I've been updating my Amazon wishlist for her and others in my family because I know they check it. The other day my wife asks me for my eBay user name and password - basically because she wants my watchlist. I mentioned that I'd changed the password recently just because I periodically update sensitive passwords - usually the banking ones especially - just to keep things safe and she makes this annoyed sounding half-grunt and says, "So that's why (the old password didn't work)." I probably should feel more bad about making her slightly annoyed but... I think it's good for her. She rejoices in teasing me enough. If she does buy me something off eBay there's a good chance it'll be a note for my Zimbabwe set. She joked about getting me a gold coin but we both know something like that is WAY outside of our normal budgets for birthdays with Gold near $2000/oz currently. As a further thought on this: She gives me grief on being hard to shop for but she's not much better - especially now - because she doesn't like stuff. She likes trips and experiences and that is almost impossible in 2020. Life gets even harder with Christmas in December, our anniversary in January and Valentine's Day in February, which makes it hard to have 3 good ideas in rapid succession, but I actually have a number of nice ideas in my back pocket this year, for once. Harris county is very close to dropping out of the "orange" risk level and into the "yellow." if that happens I may finally feel safe enough to venture to the Post Office to mail something off to Florida.

I never would have thought this would happen but there seems to be a mini bubble in collecting LEGO sets. I imagine at some point it will pop - just like all collectable bubbles do. But I just buy what's available in the stores now. Right now I'm mostly buying duplos anyway. They're safer and more age appropriate for my boys.

I don't think it'll happen. I think it was just some people reading into a rule change. But I suppose it is possible.

No... I disagree there. There are plenty in the US that hate Paypal, which is why, i think, we now have Square, Venmo, Zelle, and a few others. I only really us PayPal for eBay and one or two other things and increasingly use Zelle and Venmo.

A while back there was something going around that eBay, after this year I think, wouldn't allow coins, currency and bullion to be sold on the site. I remember saying or thinking at the time that, if they made that rule change, I'd probably be done with eBay just because that's literally all I shop for there and I just wouldn't see a point in looking or shopping there most of the time if that happened. Well, this week, as part of their 25th anniversary celebration, eBay sent me an email summarizing my activity / history on the site and it included this graphic. I think the electronics purchase was a control unit for a car's AC system, but... yeah. 95% Collectables and Art. Take that away and I haven't used eBay for much in the last 15 years. One track mind? One trick pony? I don't know... Actually I think I used eBay years ago to buy a cheaper used camera body to have a back-up / secondary body for my canon lenses years ago... so maybe there's that too for electronics. Or maybe the AC control unit was the "other."

Sorry to hear you're hurt! Hope you heal up okay.

Now, who would imagine, much less accuse, the US government of stealing so blatantly and shamelessly? Lol I honestly never heard of the 1992 program or these commemoratives, but I don't go that far North much and don't normally collect Canadian coins except for what I pull in change down here in Texas.

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.

Yeah. I think it could be nice if there was a rule that either a set should have at least 1 NGC coin or be 50-75% NGC to win the best in category. Your post that I responded to had me thinking you were referring principally to the major awards with that comment.

I don't know how much points matters to a Major award. I just know they require those to be 75% NGC graded to be eligible. So you're allowed to plus up or round out your set with PCGS coins and still be elligible for a major award but it has to be a smaller part of the set. I think that's a nice balance.

I'd feel better about selling it at that point but I'd still be inclined to share the story on it before selling. I'd also be very inclined to talk to people at the company about it at that point and maybe see if they could trace back the submissions and see who looked at it each time and where the disagreement came in and why. If NGC had the disagreement I could actually see this working as they just seem more open and willing to communicate than some companies I've had the joy of dealing with. I've never worked with PCGS but what I've heard would leave me less optimistic. Edited to add: My hang up is that, even if you find an explanation, there will always be an opinion rendered by someone that is supposed to be an authority that this thing is no good. The way I approach life, I would acknowledge that. Even if it cost me money, even if the next person didn't.