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 very much feel your pain on "from an NGC perspective." I'm definitely crazier than most with the Zimbabwe set and I've continued to get crazier. What started as just getting the Trillions and the higher denom 3rd dollar notes has evolved into an effort to build a complete pick set from P-1 to the end which I think at this point is P-102 and growing. Then I decided to do something really unkind to myself and start buying the varieties - so now I have 3 varieties of the P-1 note - and getting normal and star note varieties of some notes... So much for a simple little set... If I could ever afford and pull off a complete variety set of the 1st series of the 1st dollar I think that would be the holy grail of Zimbabwe note sets - but I'm nowhere close to that and won't be for some time, if ever. I think in the last few months I've expanded my signature set from having about 90-100 slots to having 116 slots now... I just keep making it bigger as I get crazier. I can't see myself ever upgrading much of it. Some of my notes are top pop, so there's that, but so much of that set now is 66 EPQ and even 67 EPQ or 68 EPQ. When you have grades like that, yeah, maybe there's a higher grade one out there but... why? Why spend all that money on an upgrade and not on something that just adds something more interesting or novel to your set or your broader collection? If Muzzer decides to mount a serious challenge to my 3rd dollar set I might be able to convince myself to upgrade some of the 65 EPQ notes in that set to 67 or 68 to try to keep the top spot but that's about the only way I see talking myself into it. Even then, I might feel a bit bad about giving in to putting money into what is nothing more than a registry "you-know-what" contest.

If I understand right, they're trying to make all sellers go into the managed payments system and the managed payments system / program doesn't currently allow coins, bullion, paper money, or cars... But the implementation of the program is months away and they may change other things / policies to go along with this and they haven't explicitly said they'd be banning these things so... I'm not overly worried. Nor should anyone be.