Revenant

Earlier in the week I'd been watching a 1983 Italian 500L graded Ms65 by NGC. The staring bid was $10 + $5 shipping and it had no bids. When it was about 12 hours out from ending I bid $20 hoping to win it for roughly the cost of grading and keep it until and unless something better came along - maybe one I graded myself. Then, about 15 minutes before bidding ended, someone bid $15, then $16, then $17, then $20, then something over $20... I don't know if this was a shill or someone that actually wanted the coin but nonsense like this is why i increasingly hate bidding before the last minute. I was going to bid $22 at the last minute to try to take it back. But the eBay glitches, doesn't let me bid, and it ends with me losing the coin for $20.50. I was not happy at the time but I can't help but wonder if eBay saved me from myself and did me a favor. For $26-27 or more I think I'm better off submitting one on my own with an '86 and '87 soon. It was attractive at $15-20 just to fill the whole for now but it's a lot less attractive at $25+. As it is I do have a 1983 that I think could grade out pretty well - maybe beating that MS65. Anyway... I've been a little more successful with a few other coins lately. I got an MS67 1997 500L and an MS68 100L from 1986. Neither fits into the 500L set I'm currently building in the registry because the 1997 was one of the circulating commemorative years. But both are nice coins, the 1997 is closely related to the main 500L set and Shandy liked it, and the 100L is one step closer to making an Italian birth year set for us, which I think could be cool. My in-laws were over at the house recently and I used the opportunity to pull out the graded 500L, show them to both of them and point out the coins they'd brought back that are now incorporated into it. I think my father-in-law liked seeing that I'd made a little something of / with that bag of coins and that I'd pulled that bag of foreign coins into something like that. I'm not entirely sure he understands my practice of "spending money on money" but I do think he thought that was nice. I still have not gotten to take pictures of all the new Zimbabwe coins and I want to take some pictures of some Venezuelan Coins I've been looking at lately to share but my weekends and days off keep going to other tasks lately - including cleaning out the garage. Something I've made solid progress on recently. Ben seems to have lost interest in Pokemon go for now so it's just us adults that continue to be addicted to catching them all / collecting them all and completing our pokedexes. 🤣 From talking to others this seems common. The kids get into it, the adults do it with the kids and then the kids abandon it while the adults still work obsessively to complete the game. 🤣

We haven't been guessing on grades at this point but so far we're seeing a lot of coins that we like in the 1989 denominations (5 denoms) and the 2002-2004 denominations (also 5 denominations). I'll probably have a new post about some of those soon. I can usually get things from Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and Hong Kong in just 2, maybe 3 weeks. Not months. Not sure what you're dealing with.

So yesterday there's a knock at the door and I see it's the mail carrier, and he has a small package. As I'm walking up I'm wondering what this is and thinking I'm not really expecting anything. When he gives it to me it's the 2nd set of 2002-2004 Venezuela coins from Ukraine! I had completely forgotten about these things. I've been busy and I hadn't thought about them or thought to check the tracking in weeks. The last tracking update I'd seen had them in Kiev on April 6th. Then, while I wasn't paying attention, they were scanned in New York... on May 4th... nearly a full month later. So... here they are! Funny thing being that I'd recently been through the older Venezuelan coins from the late 1980s and picked the ones of each of those 5 denoms / types that I like the best, but hadn't gotten past that. These 2002-2004 denominations were going to be the next ones I looked at. Now I can get these out and into flips and look at all the available coins together.

I don't think we'll ever see that though. Because of how NGC and PCGS differ on their labeling and such - the reason NGC gave in the beginning - it'd make too much of a nightmare for them. World PCGS just ain't coming back. I think people just need to accept that they need to decide what they want to be and make their peace with it. You want to collect what you like and not care about holders? Cool. Don't sweat the registry. You want to participate in a registry? Cool. Pick a company and buy / grade / submit accordingly. Personally, I like a consistent presentation, and it bugs me to have a set that has radically different holders. So I was always going to end up mostly collecting one company / one set of slabs for the visual consistency of the collection. So it doesn't harsh my mellow much.

I'm mostly going on Numista for now. I haven't seen enough of these to comment on their completeness.

So, after many delays prompted by sickness and other things - in the 2nd half of this week is was my “turn” to be sick - and putting these on hold to look at 500 Lire coins, I’m finally starting to look at the Venezuelan coins to maybe pick out some for a submission and building out a registry set. But the thing that normally makes all the difference for me in building these sets is building a narrative around the set. Building out these descriptions, the research and the writing often consumes more time than anything else and is what has consumed most of my collecting time. With some sets in the past, I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the designs of the coins and the cultural significance of what’s on them. In some sets I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the historical context and what was going on in the country at the time when that coin or bill was introduced. In some sets I’ve emphasized the hunt and the personal journey of building the set - or some mixture of these. The Zimbabwe note set leans heavily on the historical context with some information on the cultural importance of the things featured - almost no emphasis on the chase because 100 iterations of “I bought this on eBay" seems a bit boring. The Venezuelan note set has a similar approach but there’s a different ratio / more emphasis is put on the cultural significance of the designs and portraits. The Zimbabwe coin set leans roughly equally on the cultural significance of the designs and on the chase / the journey of building the set. I’ve been thinking the last few months about what my approach with this set was going to be - how it was going to look, how am I going to present it. I find it’s always best to “Begin with the End in Mind.” With these coins I feel like it’s going to be very hard to put much emphasis on the designs and the cultural aspect of what’s on it, for one very important reason. I’m going to quote the information card that came with the sets from the Franklin Mint: “Venezuela may hold the present-day record for the sameness of the designs used on its circulation coins. Not only do all denominations bear a signed portrait of Simon Bolivar by Albert Desire Barre, Chief Engraver of the Paris Mint (1855-1878), it is the same portrait that has been used most years since the 1870s. This likewise holds true for the coat of arms.” So, from a design standpoint, from coin to coin, there is very little (almost nothing) to talk about here. The dates and the denominations change with the size of the coin but that’s about it. This is actually a pretty stark contrast to what I ran into with the currency side on PMG with the Venezuela set because the bills featured a large number of endangered animals, national parks, and historical figures - until the people designing their bills kind of “gave up” around 2019 and started slapping the same design on everything in different colors. So I think this set is going to be more focused on the coins, the historical context behind their introduction, and how what was going on in the country / the inflation made it’s impacts on the coinage. I’ve been starting to research the coins more and I’ve been finding a few very interesting things. For example, the 1989 coins I got from these Franklin Mint sets I bought were nickel-plated steel coins that were only issued for 2-3 years, and they are almost all using almost exactly the same design or the same design as pure nickel coins that were issued mostly in the 1970s and the earlier 1980s. And these were the last coins issued from the Fourth Republic of Venezuela before the constitutional change in 1999. There were no Venezuelan coins from 1991 to 1999. This actually heavily mirrors what happened in Zimbabwe with coins being made out of better / more expensive metals in the 1980s, the switch to steel in the 1990s, a brief halt to production of coinage and then a later re-introduction of new, higher coin denominations. - Zimbabwe was just a lot quicker to abandon coins completely than Venezuela. I’m also learning that some of these coins were struck at several different mints, and that in a couple of cases a coin was struck for 3 years and struck at a different mint every one of those three years. And I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to learn about if there was some other reason for that. But some of these coins, because of this, have different design / die pairings and varieties to look for. Even more, I’m realizing that I need to take a magnet to some of these early 2000’s coins to figure out what I have - I’m learning that some of these coins were issued in two different compositions in the same years for a couple of years, with Magnetic steel coins and non-magnetic zinc aluminum coins having the same date with weights, diameters, and thicknesses that are also the same. And so, this continues to become more complicated. Among other things, I already knew there was a 2016 50 bolivar coin that I don’t have any examples of. But I’m also learning that there was a 2005-dated 1,000 bolivar coin that I hadn’t known about, and that was apparently the country’s first bimetallic, before the introduction of the 1 Bolivar Fuertes coin in 2007. Shameless plug for the 500L set but remember what I’ve said before about that, in 1982, being the first circulating bi-metallic coin, with the idea being to use this on higher denomination coins to make them harder to counterfeit. So this has Venezuela introducing bimetallics 23 years after Italy pioneered it. Several of the other coins from this period Casa de la Moneda de Venezuela in Maracay, Venezuela (1999-date). This has me wondering if this one was also produced domestically or if they outsourced the production of a more complicated coin to one of the mints in the UK, Canada, and Germany that they’d used previously - or if those mints were even willing to take the order by 2005.

The other day over the weekend I decided to finally pull those 500 Lire coins I'd ordered out and look at them to see if I'd gotten anything good / promising. I'd been wanting to look at these for a while knowing it would be kind of shot-in-the-dark and I might have something good or I might have gotten nothing. I thought I'd sit down and look while Shandy napped with Sam and Ben watched TV. But, somewhat to my surprise, Ben took notice and wanted to look at them with me and was asking if these were my gold coins and if they were "real gold." I told him, "No. They're an alloy that looks like gold in the middle." He saw a 200L in the same page and asked if that was gold - nope. Brass alloy. So since he seemed really interested in seeing the real gold ones I went and I got out the actual gold ones, which he claimed he thought were really cool. I showed him the 2016 and 2019 for their birthyears, which he seemed to think were neat, but when I asked if he thought there was one or two that were more interesting he couldn't / wouldn't pick one and he didn't want to ask about them even though I offered to talk about any of them he wanted. He, of course, wanted one - he'd wanted a 500L coin before the gold ones came out and I'd let him have one that he picked from an old batch. That 500L coin is now on the couch or between the cushions or something. I was just like, "No. You're going to be a lot older before I let you have something like this. " "How old?" "Like at least 18." "No! Like 8 or 9!" "Not happening." You can see the 500L he picked in his hands, still in his soccer jersey from the game that morning. He made some comment about how the gold coins could "make a dollar" which makes me pretty sure he has no clue just how expensive those are and that 1 of those coins is about 2 years of his allowance. Of course, one of the first things he did was count to see how many there were - he can count to 100, as he finishes his Kindergarten year. As you might imagine, I didn't get to actually look at the 500L coins well, or for very long. At the end of nap time I was feeling pretty disappointed with what I had seen because a few very nice ones I'd seen where for dates we already had well covered and I'd seen some that didn't look good at all. And I didn't get to look at these again for 2 more days, looking at them at night using a flash light to read the tiny little dates on them. However, when I finally did get to look at them I felt a bit better about the outcome. We'd gotten 25 coins when I'd been expecting 24 - but one of those was a 1994 that was one of the circulating commemorative years that doesn't fit into the registry set I'm building. From the remaining 24 there was only 1 1987 and 2 1983s, and I don't think any of those are nicer than the 1983 and 1987 I got from the franklin mint sets. However, there were 3 1986-dated coins, and a couple of those actually look pretty nice. So that might be the big score from the purchase / lot. I also got in those 2003, $10 Zimbabwe coins. I do think they are nicer than the AU58 I have but I think the seller calling them Gem Uncirc was a bit of a stretch. I think MS63 is more likely. I still might submit one with the 500L coins though just to try to improve that AU58. I got a chance to take images of the new 500L coins recently. Shandy also noticed and pointed out that, while the pictures of the old coins are nice and while the new pictures of the new coins are nice, the color balance on the images / color tint doesn't quite match, and I'm not sure how to fix that. I think to get a perfectly consistent set of images that I'm happy with I'm going to have to just re-shoot the whole group at the same time just because I'm not that good at perfectly matching things up between shoots and the human eye can pick out some small and subtle things when they're right next to each other. This is the approach I've taken with the 10G set - shooting them all again all at once - and this is probably the approach I'll take with the Zimbabwe coins, But I don't want to go that route with the 500L set just yet because if I do that I'd like to wait to send in and get back these next 2-3 coins (1983, 1986, 1987) and have the set a little more complete for that kind of effort. I would not have expected that it would be a month after getting the coins back and I wouldn't have taken shots of all the New Zimbabwe coins yet or popped them into that new case yet, but life has just been a little busy lately, including at work, and Sam and Ben have been home sick a lot lately - usually one and then the other and then the other again.

In an unrelated move my coin budget was increased 50% recently. But she's been letting.me get away with a series of "one offs" beyond my budget for 6 months... so... no complaints.

So here's kind of a funny thing from the other day. I sent Shandy a message saying, "Hey, you care if I just go ahead and order these Italian sets?" and for me it's more, "do you care if I spend the money on this?" She's okay with it but she wants to know if she can look at the pictures first to see if she thinks it's a good one - generic pictures though so we aren't going to be able to make a quality judgement on individual coins like that, so just go ahead and we'll see. But after that I basically explained, most of these things that I find online that don't have generic pictures are pug-ugly or way over-priced. So I basically have three options right now: 1) Either buy more Franklin mint sets that have 1983s in them (and some other things that might be useful later like for a 50L set) or 2) buy more lots mixed date lots of 500 L coins from this one person I've ordered from and hope for good things - nice 1983 and 1986 and 1995 coins. The last time I ordered from this person we got the 1984 that just came back as an MS66. We also got a 1987 that was kinda "Meh." So we might get more good things. We might not. Option 3 is I just watch listings and wait. She favored getting more lots of 500 Lire coins and seeing what we get. So that's what I did - we'll be getting 24 more 500 Lire to look through soon. But, I just couldn't help but find it interesting that she is now sufficiently invested in this set that she wants input on purchasing decisions.

The first of the packages of Venezuelan Coins from the Ukrainian dealer arrived. The box that came was the 2nd one shipped, containing the 2021 Digital Bolivar Coins. The first package is still showing it was last seen in Kiev. I guess we'll see on that one – but I’m mostly considering that one a lost cause after over a week with no updates. I’ll just be pleasantly surprised if I’m wrong. But at least I already had some of those from a prior order and dollarwise what I got this weekend was the bulk of the order. For a package that started its journey by leaving a war zone, the “last mile” to my house seems to have been almost more dramatic, at least with regard to the tracking history. It was supposed to be delivered a week ago on Saturday, then USPS didn’t actually attempt and said it would be delivered on Monday. Then they scanned it as being at the post office and didn’t try to deliver on Monday. When the NGC box came on Tuesday I was expecting that knock to be about the Ukrainian package, but, nope. Then, finally, on Wednesday, when I was about to just file a missing package report, it finally got delivered – but by then it had kind of had its thunder thoroughly stolen for the moment by the certificates and the graded coins coming back. I had also ordered some more 7-coin sets of the Bolivar Fuertes coins from a dealer in Utah I got Zimbabwe coins from. I'd bought 5 sets of these from a dealer in Turkey before I saw that this Utah dealer also had them - and at a lower price if buying several sets. I decided to order more just to have some from another dealer / source. The coins from the Utah dealer are very nice and may well be better than the others from Turkey. I have all the coins labeled with what dealer they came from. It will be interesting if all the "Best" ones we pick are from the new sets when we finally go through these. I've been holding off on going through these with Shandy in part because I wanted to have them all together first - or as close to it as possible. But I've felt the desire and need to start moving on these growing as the Zimbabwe submission moved closer to being done and home - time to fire off the next round, right? And that this point I really have almost every thing I wanted and needed and I don’t feel like holding things up for that 2nd Ukranian package that may never come. So if it ever does I’ll just do what I did with the many, many waves of Zimbabwe coins – pick the best of each group and compare the best of each group against each other until I arrive at 1 coin to submit. I’m yet to find someone offering either just the 50 Bolivar Fuertes coins or sets that include the 50 Bolivar Fuertes coin at a price I consider reasonable for these. The jury is still out on what to do about that and I may just proceed without them for now, just like I initially proceeded without the $2 and $5 coins with Zimbabwe, and proceeded the 2nd time with Zimbabwe without a new / better $10 and $25 coin. Sometimes you just have to make progress where you can and wait for better opportunities on other things. This may be one of the more egregious cases of “scope explosion” I’ve ever pulled on myself. What started as getting 1 of the new 2021 Digital Bolivar coins has turned into: - 5 Denominations of the Original Bolivar from the 1980s. - 5 higher denominations of the original bolivar from the early 2000s. - 7 denominations of the Bolivar Fuertes coins from ~2007 - 3 later denominations of the Bolivar Fuertes added ~2016 - 2 denominations of the Bolivar Soberano - 3 denominations of the “Digital” Bolivar 25 denominations spanning 3 redenominations and 4 currencies over about 40 years… Yeah… So much for one little coin… I’m a lunatic, but you knew that already. I'm thinking I’ll try to get these out with some 500L coins in May - if I can convince Shandy to let me get away with it. We cracked open a couple of Italian Franklin Mint sets the other day for a 1983 and 1987 500L for that set. The 1987 looked great once I got it out but the 1983 looked a little disappointing once we got to see it bare. So now I’m looking into a couple of options on trying to get another, hopefully better, 1983. I also found a seller offering what they described as “Gem Uncirc” $10 Zimbabwe coins for the first time. So, I ordered a few of those, which should be arriving any day now and I’m hoping for good things. If those look good I’ll probably add that to the Italian coins and the Venezuela coins if and when those go out to resolve one of the last major weaknesses of the Zimbabwe set.

I think I'd actually go for the first one in that group where she's smiling all happy to print and frame but I'll keep that in mind. Yeah. Too bad it's a relatively short set. I may need to start getting creative with new placed to take it. But I think including the circulating commemorative years that aren't part of that registry set - 1993, 1996. 1997 - might be the first step when the time comes. But, for now, I still have some gaps to address.

Just like i can't ever take her for granted.

The box came with the Zimbabwe and Italian coins yesterday. With the kids in bed and the chores handled we sat down together to take them out of the box. She joked about me and my hoard and how pleased I was, but I was surprised by how quickly the 500 L coins were pulled away and how happy she was to get to handle them and look at those. I went at one point and got the other 500L coins, the previous submission of Zimbabwe coins and a couple of empty boxes I have. I gave one of the boxes to her and she was thrilled to realize she was getting her own box for her group of 10 coins - but, seriously, 10 coins is a decent number and a lot to handle as loose slabs. So it made sense, but it also made her really happy. When I handed her the box she actually perked up more, smiled and said, excitedly, "I get my own box?!?" I also had to pull out all the old coins, lay the out, order them, and there ya go: the largest collection of NGC Graded Zimbabwean coins in the world - because no one else has been crazy enough yet. After we were done looking I got on my phone and popped all the cert numbers into the sets at last. Shandy called me crazy because of all the "TOP POP" coins, but most are top mostly because there are so few graded, and her newly expanded set isn't short on Top Pops for now, for similar reasons. But she may have a point that the Zimbabwe set is now complete (but very much working on the 500L set) and that set now presents just a wall of "Top Pop" only broken at one place for now. My "cute, dopey, derpy set of (well-presented) Top-Pops" fullfilled! She spent the rest of the night referencing "my" (her) coin collection and pointing out, "I think you love me." I did good. She's happy. Her with the 1990 that her family brought back, that is now in an NGC holder as an MS67. So, there you have an "unboxing" story, that is really more about the moment than the coins.

Just for the pure humor of having an error coin / die crack coin with an erroneous holder, I don't think I'd do a thing. I think I'd keep it as is. I mean, just thinking about how rare attributable errors can be, that can't be a very common thing, to have it line up like that.

Yeah. It gets a little funny though in some series where they flip-flop on what side goes up over the years and so you get some very funky looking sets of slabs - I think my Kookaburras are like this. Some have the (yearly changing) bird side up, some of the Queen up. Since I don't show the full holder in the images I post anyway, on those series / coins, I upload the pictures they way I want them, to be consistent. Regardless of how the coin is oriented in the holder.

Yeah... That's a bit too niche for me. I can kind of see it to an extent, I do think things like that could be interesting, and I even sometimes could see paying a *little* extra for something like that... But the coin is ultimately where it's at for me, and I don't think I'd pay much more than maybe 10%-20% over the going rate for the coin for the novelty of that. I would really struggle to pay 3 or 4 or 5 times the going rate for the coin just because of the holder. The fact that there are people who will just says to me that there's way too much speculation and way too much money sloshing around looking for something to do. I say that, knowing that I've said a lot about my set of 10G coins having mostly been in the older gen holders when I got them and mostly with older 195/196 serial numbers that were issued around 1993, but that was more about the shared history of the coins and the story of the set, not the holders - which I made pretty clear when I sent them all in to be re-holdered into scratch resistant holders last year so they'd all be pretty and match with each other.

So here is the 2nd post about 1 submission, splitting off the 500L coins to give them their due, befitting a group of 7 coins (decent sized group in their own right by my submission standards) and a group of coins that represent their own, very important project. And here are the results - Shandy and I picked the ones to send together when we had more than one of a certain date, but we didn't play “guess the grade” on these because we didn't have a big selection of graded coins in different grades to look at with Zimbabwe. We just had 2 coins - a MS67 and a MS68. Hands down the big win here is the grade on the 1990 - the highest grade in the submission going to one of those two super important coins that they brought back from Italy nearly 30 years ago. And it is a legitimately good grade - not just the highest grade in a low scoring submission. 😅 An MS67 is dang good for something that spent 28 years in a bag. That 67, combined with the 1992 in MS67 and the ’82 and ’85 in MS68, gives the set a strong core. The 1991, also crucial for the same reason, didn't do as well but it did good enough. An MS64 is high enough for it to not be too much of a liability to the set point / score-wise. With both of those I thought they would grade well but you never know when a grader is going to feel there's a bit of wear that you didn't see and then you get an AU55/58 - like that 1875 10G I posted about seeing on eBay some time ago. These grades are going to help these coins stay in the set as the sentimental core of it while still keeping the set strong. I had hoped the 1992 would match the MS67 I bought last year but it just missed at a MS66. However... I still feel like this coin is more attractive than the MS67. So, I think this is actually the coin I'll keep in the set for now unless I need points and adding back the MS67 could make a difference. 😅 But, the MS67 does look mighty fine in the images I got of it. We’ll see. The result on the 1985, while not a bad grade IMO - I would have been pretty happy with straight 65s to fill out the set - basically confirms I made the right choice snapping up that MS68 from the same year. As to the other 3 - two MS66s and a MS64. Again - solidly "good enough." Two of three hit the MS65 threshold I wanted for filling the set with gem uncirculated coins or better and two of them did 1 point better. The one that missed only missed by a little. Now I just need to cut up those Franklin Mint sets and send in that '1983 and '1987... and find an '86, '95, 2000 and 2001... Some other fun updates that are somewhat related: The certificates arrived from NGC - I pulled them out of the mailbox the same day I posted about the Zimbabwe grades. It's possible they were sitting there for a while. Life was a bit crazy, and I wasn't checking the mail - almost late paying the water bill! I told Shandy that, since I took a picture with the plaques, she needs to hold these. For those that thought it would have been great if the Zimbabwe coin award had still had my little typo on it, you may be happy to know the distinction of immortalizing that goes to the "Best in Category" certificate, which are generated and printed automatically. I've been working as hard as I can to get the descriptions for all 29 of these coins fleshed out and finished and uploaded into my registry, but not adding them to the sets that they're for. Once they arrive I'll pulse out full group of coins (the ones that made the cut anyway) into the main sets and then I just have to get good pictures of everything! 😅

Thanks! Hopefully they're enough to help keep some competition away. 😅🤞

I think it helps to have graded coins as an established baseline for comparison - the lack of that is one of the reasons we didn't try this at all with the 500L. We just picked what we liked the best, sent it off and hoped for the best. But she did do well. We both laughed every time we said the same grade though - and we did hit the nail on the head together in a couple.

TL:DR – The coins did great and I’m thrilled and freaking out a bit about some of these! XD So “Thank you, NGC” on the hard work and the much faster than expected turnaround. I need to give major props to NGC, who have pulled off a major turnaround, brought turnaround times down and delivered me grades on these months sooner than I was thinking. It was only about 5-6 weeks ago that I was saying I might not have grades for another 4 months from now. I’m hoping this also means that they’ve succeeded in expanding capacity and their 60-hour weeks are also a thing of the past. Since there are 29 coins in this submission, and 22 from Zimbabwe, I’m just going to talk about the Zimbabwe coins here and talk about the results on the 500L in a separate post. Even then, I’m not going to go into has much detail and discussion on each of these things as I might with a 5-coin submission. I’m just going to hit on some of the high notes (if I can stop myself). Here are the results, with my guesses and Shandy’s so you can see how we did. We both like to be deliberately conservative in our guesses to try to not get our hopes too high. So, we tended to be low when we missed, but it also makes the ones where we got lower than we guessed just a touch more disappointing. Shandy had made it clear that she’d never let me hear the end of it if she beat me, so I’ll gladly take a narrow win that still leaves both of us with our dignity. I think she’s learned a lot, and quickly, and she’s quickly gotten very picky about which ones she thinks are good enough. I’m really thrilled with these results. Only 3 coins are in the “disappointing” column – there were 4 MS64s but I don’t consider the 1997 $2 a disappointment because that grade was in-line with expectations. The same could be argued of the 2002 dime for that matter, which, if anything, beat expectations / did better than we’d guessed and hoped. The 2002 $1 also came back with the grade I guessed – just below the guess Shandy made. So maybe only 1 of 22 can fairly be called a disappointment – that 1988 cent I’d had such high hopes for. The 1997 $2 is worth calling out. At MS64 it easily beats the XF45 that is the only other NGC graded example eligible for that slot. It also beat Mike’s guess that it would get at least an MS63. I’d initially hoped it might do better but… It is still by far the best I’ve seen. Most of the 1997 dated $2 I’ve been able to find are just… so… ugly. I’m very grateful to Mike for this coin. I’m not going to be in a rush to try to upgrade this one and I doubt it would be all that easy. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that 3 out of 4 of these MS64s are still better than anything else I have for the slot. Meaning 3 of these 4 still earn a spot in the top set. Meaning 3 of 4 clearly weren’t a “waste” / complete misfire – they still improve the top line set and in so doing achieve what I’d hoped for in sending them in. We got several MS66 and MS67 grades, including some on some key coins, but those weren’t on coins that could fully paper over these sub-Gem coins. Having said all that though, I had really hoped for an MS68 on that 1997 5C, and, while I got an MS67 on the 1980, that MS65 on the 5C is not what I’d been hoping for there. So maybe that’s disappointing too, even though the 1980 makes up for it. The 1980 10C getting an MS66 feels like a big win and vindication on sending it in. It did, in fact, beat the MS65 I already have. This can be bitter-sweet as it knocks out the first coin bought for the set, but it also means the top type set will be 100% self-submitted – no bought-pre-graded coins. The thing that makes this even better is the fact that the 1980 5C got an MS67 – a staggering, fantastic victory in its own rights to me - and the 1980 50C and $1 got MS66, meaning that I have 2/3rd of a 1980 year set in MS66 or better now – but that just means I’m now having dreams in my head of adding an MS66 1980 cent and 20C. The MS67 on the 2002 $5 coin just feels so great and cleansing after the disappointment of those nasty examples from the now long-ago first purchase of 10-coin sets. The same is true, albeit to an obvious lesser extent, with the MS66 on the 2002 $2. It might seem strange to some that I just feel so happy about MS65, MS66, and MS67 grades on modern coins when the prevailing wisdom with moderns tends to be that you need MS68s for it to be worth it/ to be competitive, but I’ve long felt like I would be thrilled / happy to have the set mostly comprised of MS65 (Gem) coins or better and to be complete. It is now complete, with mostly MS65 or better coins. I’m happy. And these results are 1) consistent roughly with my guesses, and 2) far better than what I got when I tried self-submitting with my stepfather the first time 14 years ago. Suggesting that I might have actually learned a LITTLE in that time, in addition to taking damage to my corneas. Lol I’m blown away by the results on the Bond coins. I can’t believe how well the $2 coins bond coins did – coins I got from that seller in the Ukraine, small aside. I am suddenly extremely happy that I went ahead and sent in both of those. EXTREMELY happy. I don’t know what I’ll do with the 2nd MS69. When I was looking at the pop reports / census for clues and saw 2 MS69s I had to pick my jaw up off the floor realizing those might be mine and I might have scored a HUGE win. I was thinking I’d be happy if I got MS67s that matched most of the rest of the Bond Coin sets. I just could not get myself to hope for MS68s or MS69s even though they looked darn near perfect because I’ve never gotten grades that high on circulation strike coins. To get those 69s on both $2 BCs and a 68 on the $1… Mind Blown. So happy on these. My first self-made circulation strike MS68s and MS69s. Overall, this is going to leave me with a very solid type set that I think will be well positioned to defend its title for a while, though it will certainly be possible for anyone with the funds, the time and the determination to overtake this set. The overall strength this gives to the set and to the bond coins, however, does re-emphasize the fact that at some point I will need to address the weakness of the $10 and $25 coins to bring them more in line with the rest of the set. The overall strength of the Bond Coins is also going to make me feel more pressure to one day get the 50C bond coin up to a MS67+ to match the standard set by the others in that group / sub-set. With 7 bond coins I do think that sub-set could make for a nice set / category on its own and there are plenty of categories out there with only 6-8 slots – just look at some of the mint sets. But I think there will have to be more collector interest in those before NGC agrees to that. I feel lucky enough to have the type set category to put these in, given how thinly they’re collected in graded form (Mostly just me and my crazy). I’m very excited to get to upload some descriptions I’ve already been working on for these. As with the last set, each coin will have some general information on the design / landmark it depicts followed by a narrative on how that coin came to be in the set. These descriptions will heavily copy each other and borrow some of the narrative from my journals about all of these. I’ve worked carefully to keep track of what group of coins / sets / dealers each coin came from so I could build that into the narrative for each coin and have these descriptions emphasize the journey and the hunt of a 100% self-submitted set that I’ve made by looking at the coins with my wife. I think that’s part of what won this set an award from NGC and I think it’s very core to the charm and the appeal of the set as I’ve made it. I’m also really excited about taking good photos of all of these in the holders when they come in. The case Shandy got me for these has been sitting in the closet in the packaging, waiting for me to be able to properly fill it. I’m very excited by the prospect of being able to pull that out, put all the coins in, and lay it out. I think I’ll need to put up pictures of that in future entry – Maybe include the plaque for the set in the image. Can you tell that I’m excited about this? XD So, in summation - I’m thrilled. I consider this a big win. But it also leaves a few things unresolved and opens a few more thoughts / dreams. I think I’ll be on pause with this for a while, but I’ll likely have to circle back later to tie up some of those loose ends – the 2003 $10, the 2003 $25, the 1980 1C.

4/6 Update. Apparently the 2nd group of coins I got a tracking number for - the 2021 coins - have made it to New York. The first set were last scanned a few days ago in Kiev, of all places. These coins will have come from a literal war zone.

Unfortunately I'd say the odds are small that these people or their would-be customers will ever see this. I also think the odds of these sellers caring is zero. They know what they're doing. They have no shame.

3/31/2022 update: The Zimbabwe / Italy sub has moved from Grading / QC to Grading / Encapsulation/ Imaging. At this point I can't help but hope I might see official grades as early as tomorrow (4/1). However, there has been a big step up in the Zimbabwe population in the census and I can't help but wonder if these are my coins. I've been fooled by the before with Xan's submission last year but some of what I'm seeing lines up very well with my coins and this would be VERY good news for me if these are mine (and very bad if they're someone else's). I submitted a single 2017 $1 bond coin and 2 2018 $2 bond coins. The census now shows a $1 BC in MS68 and 2 $2 BCs - both in MS69!!!! If those are mine I'm about to be freaking thrilled. Pop reports also show a new $2 1997 in MS64, which would be solid and easily dethrone that XF45 as a top pop - whoever owns it. Shandy and Sam are both home sick today and so I can't do a full deep dive to try to divine grades from the pop report but this is very encouraging! A quick scan suggests some good MS64-66 grades could be coming back on the older coins,, which would be a big win for me.. Shandy encouraged me to go ahead and send both the 2018 $2 coins because they both just looked perfect and we could not choose between them.

Don't you put that evil on me!! I'll just cry with my collection of gold coins while I quietly remember how fortunate I am.

I placed that order for the Venezuelan Coins from the Ukranian dealer about 2 weeks ago and hadn't heard a peep since. At this point I'd mostly written if off, thinking it increasingly unlikely that anything would come of it and just wishing the dealer well. Today though, to my surprise, I got a shipment notice for 1 part of the order - the older 2002-2004 coins, but not the newer 2021 coins. I'm happy to see a sign of life from the dealer. I'm glad to see something indicating that they're still alive out there. I still don't know if I should have my hopes up for the coins making it out of the country. I also don't know if I'll be getting all of it (and they just only sent the tracking number on one item but it has all the coins) or just the older coins, if they do make it here. I guess I'll see if I get any more tracking updates and / or another tracking number later. Edited to update (3/30): I got a shipping notification and tracking number for the 2nd part of the order today and something on tracking saying the first package is with the carrier. I'm wondering if things are a bit safer around that area currently or if they just decided to go in and process orders. Hopefully this is a sign that they're feeling safe enough to conduct business in that area. I suppose another possible explanation is that the war is making it harder to actually ship packages / give them to a carrier even when picked and ready. It is amazing how much of what makes life function you get to take for granted in times of peace and how quickly that can be lost in war. Hard to know much of anything really. But hopefully they make it through. It is a great irony to me that the areas getting destroyed the most in this are the areas that most favored economic ties to Russia over the EU, and Russia is likely literally killing the friends they had in Ukraine. What's left of that country after this will likely never again see themselves as "one people" with Russia as Putin contends. Edited again to add: My Zimbabwe / Italy submission has made it to Grading / Quality Control Yay! I think based on this I might know grades in April sometime!