Revenant

It's already the cheapest tier and I think they get plenty anyway - especially in bulk. I'm sure they sick of looking at monster boxes of Eagles since January and they'd like a change. Lol I also imagine the moderns aren't the ones people would be itching to take to an event like this unless it's an old modern from the 50s. I could be wrong though.

I wonder if these people think these things are rare just because they personally have never seen one before or if they're just fishing for suckers.

You can still get to it and I can still access the information you're talking about if you're talking about what I think. https://coins.www.collectors-society.com/

Yup.

Ah okay. I got my wires crossed on that one. Maybe she did too. Looking at it, I'd say your first post / thought is right and it'd be $17 per reholder. Because there is nothing saying that the $12 reholder is to a scratch resistant one and there's nothing on the "Upgrade to Scratch-Resistant Holder" that says you don't have to pay the $5 for it over a standard reholder. BTW, have you seen the Mega Reholder? Ouch!

My wife somewhat randomly brought up about a week ago that she and I are both "Tigers" - We were both born in the year of the Tiger for the Chinese Zodiac - 1986 specifically. She teaches English to Chinese kids and what brought this up was some parents had been asking other teachers if their young child was a "pig," meaning born in 2019, which was the year of the pig, which Samuel is, as it happens. So this got her curious and she looked up what we were and what Ben and Sam were and what the traits are that are associated with those animals and all that good Bull. When she started talking about this I pulled out my old Lunar 1 series Tiger, Monkey (Ben is a monkey, and, boy, is he one), and Pig coins. I also pulled out my Lunar Series 2 Tiger from 2010 but mentioned that I didn't have the Series 2 Monkey or Pig coins. I showed her pictures of the designs of the Series 2 Monkey and Pig and she likes the fact that both coins show an adult with one or more children, and I'm using this, with the fact that they were made on our son's birthyears, to get permission to go after the Series 2 Monkey and Pig coins and not count it towards my normal collecting budget. I am not opportunistic! I swear! Anyway... I won an auction for the Monkey coin. I'm going to see if I can get a 5% eBay bucks deal and snap up a 2019 pig coin for about the same price. Similar to what I did with the 1/4th oz gold eagles I'm going to try to get MS70s for both and get matching labels for both. This monkey coin is "One of the First 1000 Struck" but the Pig coin I'm eyeing for Sam will once again be an "Early Release," because that's exactly what he is. The seller I'm looking at buying the pig from has 4 of them so I'm going to wait for the 5% deal for now, but if they look like they might sell out I'll probably just snap one up to not let the coin I want get away. On an unrelated note, we just got back from spending the weekend at a rented pool house for her birthday, which is how she wanted to celebrate it - so I'm not spending all our fun money on pieces of shiny metal anyway. The trip gave me a chance to prove once again that my strength as a photographer doesn't necessarily lie in coin photography, even though I do enjoy it. I will never get tired of taking pictures of her though.

Yeah, getting these things reholdered isn't cheap. I can definitely understand why some people say that if they get a coin in a holder that looks beat to hell they just send it back / return it to the dealer because it's not as simple as just saying, "Oh I'll get it reholdered later." That can be quite cost prohibitive unless you have a large budget.

True, but he never called them that before, and I normally refer to my "sets."

I really don't know why they even make them with PVC anymore. You'd think that someone would have gotten that memo by now.

Congrats on some very good grades! I finally ordered some flips as a first step on the road to submitting some randoms.

For about the last week or so Ben keeps saying that he needs things for his “collection.” He has a robot “collection.” His Legos are a “collection” now. His toys are a “collection.” He needs all my old dice for his “collection.” I’m not sure where this came from, but I really don’t think it was from me. I don’t think I use the word “collection” around him very often. I’m thinking he must have gotten this from one of his little shows he watches on Netflix – maybe even power rangers since I think there was a character / villain on that not too long ago that collected “goodies” in glass jars (kinda creepy). It's cute and all... now he just needs to stop taking all of my stuff!

I got a little time today where Shandy had both the kids occupied and I decided to get that ring light out and go for it to get some proof of concept shots. I decided to snap some quick shots of something I’ve taken pictures of recently so I can compare the shots I get this way to some recently taken shots done the way I’ve been doing them lately (camera on the floor with an LED on a speedlight). So, I grabbed my 1880 10G. Old photos taken the old way: New Photos taken with the Ring Light: I hate to say it but I think I like my old way better. The photos with the ring light look like they're sharper and show some of the details better but the old photos pop better and show off the luster better. I may have to try this again with a proof coin and see if this approach makes that any easier because the approach I've been using usually doesn't work with proof coins and the mirrored surfaces. While the photos turned out well I don’t think I’ll be making frequent use of this and I’ll probably only try this if I can have a fair bit of time and take a bunch of photos all at once. This is a lot more effort to set up than what I’ve been doing lately with the need to get the light out and set up on a light stand, getting a tripod out and getting the camera set up on the tripod, properly oriented / situated with the light and the stand for the coin, and getting the coin positioned at right height (fancy way of saying “stacking books”). It’s just a lot more work and I’m not sure it’d be worth it to take a few quick shots of one coin or note. I gotta say, I’m shocked by how ungrateful the wife was through the whole process. Here I am, checking her equipment to make sure the new light works and that it’s compatible with my old light stands and the light stand for her first light and taking some test shots – showing that I can use this to make a set-up to take some really nice beauty shots – of her, of course, using the coins as a proxy – and while I’m doing all this I hear her talking to her mom on the phone, accusing me of “playing with coins.” Sheesh! How ungrateful! (Yup. She reads these. Yes. I will die soon.)

Hopefully / maybe I'll get a chance this weekend. It's going to take a little set-up work to run it the way I want to.

A few months ago, my wife got this ring light to use when she’s doing her web-based English lessons with Chinese students (13 time zones away). Up to this point she’d been using the modeling lights on some old cheap strobes I had to do her lighting. I went head and got this ring light for her because 1) using the strobes just for the modeling lights is inefficient (they’re power hogs) and 2) the strobes generate a lot of waste heat, which heats up the room and can make her uncomfortable when teaching in the summer. These LED lights are much more energy efficient and generate a lot less heat and they have some other features that just make them better suited to this role. I’ve long suspected that this thing could probably make for some really nice, even, non-directional lighting for coin and macro photos if I set my camera up on a tripod on-axis with the light. But my wife teaches 5 days a week and the thing stays in-place and I haven’t really felt brave enough to try to steal it one afternoon and try some shots. Yes, I could put the thing back when I’m done but I could still see it becoming a nuisance or point or irritation for her if I don’t quite get it right or get the level slightly wrong or don’t get the cord (and the in-line switch) quite back where she wants and needs it. Lol She’s NOT overly irritable and I’m NOT trying to say she is, but I could see that becoming a gripe or a pet peeve over time or it ticking her off if it causes her frustration at an important moment. Times are stressful as it is right now so I see messing with this light in any way as an invitation for trouble one way or another. But I did recently see a reddit post on the coins sub-reddit where someone used one of these lights to take pictures of a coin in a slab - an NGC slab no less - and it produced some good results with no glare or reflection over the coin and minimal shadowing. So, of course, I order a 2nd one, “so she’ll have a spare.” This also happens to mean there is a 2nd one in the house now that I can probably play with without possibly incurring her terrible terrible wrath. (In all seriousness I DID order it so she’d have a spare because the kids have recently done some things that risked breaking it and I don’t want her to have to switch back to the hot lights in the middle of the summer if the kids kill her light. But I’m not going to lie and say this doesn’t potentially have some nice things for me in the deal.)

I've definitely seen some things lately where I wanted an item but the seller was listing it at a price that seemed divorced from reality and common sense. There are some things I've been watching literally for years that have not sold at the asked price, and, now that things are harder and people are cutting back, it's hard to imagine those things selling at those prices any time soon. But, as life goes, the seller / dealer owns it and can ask whatever they want and sit on it and pay listing fees on it until doomsday if that's really what they want... When in doubt, if it doesn't feel right, just don't do it. There will be more opportunities and maybe better opportunities down the road and there is something to be said about the uncertainty of the times. In 2016 I spent about $100-150 on some silver rounds about a week before I got laid off. The box came after I lost my job. I felt rather stupid for it at the time.

Yeah. But if I order them and they arrive then maybe I have to actually do something because of my lack of excuses.

When you make a stack using a triple interlocking ring arrangement with about 19 pennies to each layer it makes for a shorter but more stable stack - only way I could get it that tall without it falling over.

Sigh... I need clear plastic flips...

I didn't do quite that well but I joined last year for a reduced fee of $15 and signed up for auto-renewal so it renews for $20/year now. I pretty much never submit either but I do like the idea of supporting this place a little.

I own one of these in MS65 that I bought years ago for close to melt (I think probably Melt + 20-30% but it was years ago). I can't imagine anyone giving you much over melt + 3-5% for an MS63.

There are days when I really wish this was still the summer of 2006 and I could spend an entire week searching rolls of pennies looking for things to put in my Whitman folders or looking through rolls of dimes and quarters looking to see if there might be any old silver ones in there like I see other people talking about on Facebook and Reddit. There are times lately when I wish I had the chance to try to beat the personal record I set for myself when I made a 19.5 inch tall column of pennies that contained about $122 in pennies and weighed more than my 4 year old currently does. Even before this, as I think I've mentioned, it's been on my agenda / wishlist to go back and update those old coin albums with coins from the last 10-15 years, but I just don't have time to do it the way I want to - by hitting the bank and pulling the coins from circulation, just like I filled them in the first place. But you can’t do that when you have kids in the house that would try to eat said pennies and dimes. As if to underline this, Sam found a dead bug in the corner the other day and was sticking it in his mouth. Kids, right? Finds a dead bug and tries to eat it. Yuck. … and one thing you have to acknowledge for pennies is that they are dirty. It has been 15 years and I still remember having black fingertips after handling / searching through pennies for a few hours… and they stink. Something about pennies / copper - they just flat our stink in a way that copper-nickel clads and silver coinage doesn’t. Fortunately I don’t have much of a sense of smell (I can barely smell spoiled milk) but my family insists that the smell that comes off 100 pounds of old pennies is quite unpleasant.

Well… It was working out of a while. The problem they ran into is that when they seized those assets the Oil Companies still had (and they didn't) the knowledge to maintain those assets. Even if they still had the knowledge or know-how, you have to pay / spend a lot of money to maintain them in good working order. When things inevitably break you have to have left some of your profits set aside to fix them, or else there are no profits later.

I think there's that bittersweet element to finishing and ending anything. But, as you said / implied or, what can be inferred from reading here, if you're willing to go far enough down the rabbit hole, almost any project can be made endless / unending. It reminds me of that line from "Rose Red" - "It's finished, when you say it's finished." I might be slightly sad / find it bittersweet if I ever manage to get to 100% complete on my 10G set but... Holy ****! That'll be a proud moment for me after all these years - assuming it even happens!

I’m narrowing in on getting to call several on-going projects complete. My 10G set is about 80% complete if you don’t count the 1879/7 variety. My Queen’s Beast sets are getting into about that same 80% range and several of the parts / sub-series of my Zimbabwe hyperinflation set are getting to be about 85-92% complete by pick number. Most of these sets are missing only 1-3 issues before they’re 100% complete registry sets. One thing I’ve been noticing lately is that, as I narrow in on the end, each new purchase feels a lot more satisfying than they did in the beginning. When I started my 10G set I bought 4 coins for it in one or two months of a summer, but I don’t think I found those four purchases quite as satisfying and fulfilling even as adding that 1880. Granted, those 4 coins were the more common dates where the 1880 was semi-key, but I don’t think that was it. Buying the White lions for my Queen’s Beasts sets recently just felt good in a way that buying the Griffins (2nd coin of 10) just didn’t a few years ago. There’s just something about narrowing in on the win. I’m feeling this somewhat keenly with the Zimbabwe set recently with several big recent wins for my 1st dollar set. I joke with my wife that I’ve been telling myself for 8 months now that I was going to step back on this set and focus on other things but I feel myself compelled to keep driving forward as some key milestones for the set creep closer. You keep going for that next note just because it gets you just a little. bit. closer. There’s a P-3c out there for sale that would easily be the most expensive note I’ve ever bought for this set if I pulled the trigger and yet I find myself somewhat tempted just because that is the last pick number I don’t have a representative piece for in my 1st dollar set and it would make my main 1st dollar competitive set 100% complete. On the flip side though, I’m realizing that the road ahead on that set might yet be somewhat larger than I thought it was.

I haven't been posting to this journal as much lately because my focus has been on my Zimbabwe note set the last 2-3 weeks and so I've been posting over on the PMG side - go look if you actually want to see me ramble about that hyperinflation set some more. I think I mentioned this before but I recently convinced my wife to let me violate the normal limits on my budget and use part of that Stimulus check to buy some of the coins I needed for my queen's beast sets - the last 2 Yales I needed and 4 of the White Lions. At this point I've gotten all 6 of the first 7 coins for the sets I'm building and / or giving away and I have 8 for 4 sets. While I have managed to talk Shandy into this, Ben has positively made out like a Bandit. We decided to get him a playset for the backyard so he can get to swing and have a slide as lockdown starts on it's 3rd month for us - we're about 58 days into our self-isolation now. We found out in the course of our shopping that my mother-in-law had been thinking about getting him one too, so we decided to combine the $300 we were considering spending with the $200 she chipped in and got him something nicer. We spent $25 to add a baby swing seat to it in place of the normal 2nd swing so Sam could swing too. Building this was awful. It took two whole days to building this the other weekend and when it was over I was hurting... just. ouch. So Ben is living high on the hog now between this and the sandpit (and 650 back breaking pounds of sand) that we bought for his birthday. Then I decided to go and sweeten the pot this week... Almost exactly a year ago I bought this four gun set of two single-shot pistols and two single-shot "break barrel" rifles as Ben's first nerf guns. They were $20 for the set so I figured it couldn't go too wrong. We also got some water guns at the time, because it's May in Texas. These things weren't the best for shooting / fighting with but they were a good starting point. Ben was 3 and he wasn't physically strong enough to prime the rifles or guns yet. Recently though he's demonstrated the ability to prime the rifles (but not yet the pistols) on his own and he's been showing more interest in playing with them and shooting at cans as target practice (what he calls "can practice."). Based on that I decided it was time to get him new rifles that are able to load more than one dart and fire faster. So I went looking and found these rotating-drum guns that have a 20 dart capacity and which you don't have to break open to load. At $20 each these were as much as the whole set I got before but it's still a great value IMO that we'll get a lot of fun with. I got two of them because you have to have more than one for fighting with. <.< It's necessary, ya'll! In the course of doing this I found something very cool that I decided I wanted... It was almost as expensive as the other two combined but... who can say no to that!?! It's cool! A clip-loader with a bi-pod and a scope!! My wife has been teasing me about this and my excitement over it for a week now... By her own admission though she's wanting to take it and play with it too though! Once we get them in the mail and they wait the required 3 day mail quarantine period - assuming Ben isn't grounded for a lot of bad behaviors he's been exhibiting lately - we'll get these out. I'm super excited to see how he responds to these and how excited I'm sure he's going to be and I'm excited to play with them with him. Once I see what he responds to I may be buying a 3rd of the drum-loaders and / or a 2nd one of the sniper / assault rifle.