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Revenant

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Journal Entries posted by Revenant

  1. Revenant
    A few entries ago I jokingly referred to my 10G set as my “golden babies.” I thought was being silly and a little tongue-in-cheek, but my wife has given me no end of ribbing about this, so I think I’m going to be continuing to catch grief about that for a while every time those coins come up in conversation.
    I think this cements the Zimbabwe set as my “pride and joy” and the 10G set as my “golden babies” whenever my wife feels the need to tease me.
    They do look good in the new holders though, almost like they are a set of things that belong with each other.

    I can't find an old shot I thought I had of the 8 NGC coins / 9 coins together and alone but the shot below (vs the above) helps show how much more cohesive this makes the group look.
    The large number of old fatty holders in the set gave the set some consistency in presentation, but, after 25+ years some of those holders were just scratched to hell and some of the holograms on the back were just ... gone. it's a much prettier set now.
    It may have just not been necessary to reholder the 1888 at all since it was already in a new-gen holder with a new-gen label, but now it is scratch resistant!

     
  2. Revenant
    A few months ago I talked to another collector who recalled a conversation where-in he and someone else agreed that, if they had tried to build their collections today, buying graded coins and not ones they “discovered” themselves, they never could have afforded to build their collections because prices have gone up so much.

    I can’t help but think of that statement periodically and ask myself, “So do we really want the value / price of these things to go up?” Or, stated more usefully, “Do I?”

    The answer to the first question is always “it depends” - and this is true whether I ask it of coin collectors or silver stackers - like at the r/silverbugs subreddit. People who are accumulating / building (usually younger) want prices lower (or, at least stable, no one wants to feel like they lost money really). People that are selling or looking to sell soon (usually older, possibly who viewed their collections as part of their retirement savings) tend to want prices higher or rising.

    But personally, I don’t know that I care fore the idea of rising prices. I don’t know that I care if the value of my 10G set and some similar projects ever rises. Part of this is that I don’t view my collection as an investment - certainly not solely as an investment. I have a budget for “fun” / my entertainment and the coins are bought out of that. The 401K is funded completely as its own thing. I want to keep building my collection into my old age.

    Yeah, I like the idea that there’s some gold / silver value in a coin and that helps provide somewhat of a floor whereby I wouldn’t have to sell the thing for 10 cents on the dollar of what I paid for it hopefully… but I’m hoping to not sell. My most important projects are things that I’m hoping to pass on to my sons upon my death. So, value at resale is something I hope to never worry about. Meanwhile, lower prices mean I get to keep collecting.

    I do definitely hope I don’t take too much of a loss on some of these coins if I have to sell, but I know that I almost certainly will take some kind of small loss on them unless gold goes up meaningfully. Why? Because I’m one of the few that collects some of these as coins and doesn’t treat them mostly as bullion.

  3. Revenant
    This might be a bit rambling but I will get to a point, I swear.
    My wife and I got that 2nd stimulus check a few weeks ago and we set about spending the majority of it on 1) redoing and improving our kids playroom to make it more comfortable and fun for the boys ($500 that has made life sooo much easier for Shandy) 2) allowing us to spend more than we normally would have on anniversary presents and 3) planning a weekend AirBnB get away to celebrate Ben’s Bday since he will once again not be getting a party with friends.
    I was joking with my wife last week that, if this $1400 third round gets passed (which, who knows what that will be for a family of 4 this time - IF something gets passed - IF we're elligible) I'd love to pick up a couple of the small gold coins on my list that I'd like to get- including an Italian 20L and / or a Swiss 20F.
    She said she was maybe open to that but the other high priority thing is that Sam has an intensive, 3 week therapy session coming up in March and she was wanting to use the check, if we got one, to minimize the impact on our savings. We've been waiting for them to run it on insurance (we have great insurance) but we've been worried that this might be a $3,000-5,000 hit for us, but it's something we both feel Sam will benefit from.
    Anyway... we found out that - in part because of the way they bill and the way the insurance treats it - we may only be out $1,250. We already have this set aside to pay medical costs / his deductible for this year.
    So I'm thinking the coin budget might be saved / beefed up a little if 1) we get a third check, 2) I get a bonus, or 3) our tax bill is less than the ~$4,500 I have set aside for it.
    Of course, this usually involves making some concessions to Shandy too. Last year she was supposed to get a spa day which she never got because of CoVID and it is still owed to her. I still have no clue when she'll feel safe enough to do that. Maybe in Q3 when / if most people are vaccinated and we are too hopefully.
    Seems like the reddit silver squeeze attempt is fizzling and not sizzling for now so I'm hoping prices will be mostly reasonable when the time comes, if the time comes.
    We'll see if any of this day dreaming amounts to anything but it's fun for now either way.
  4. Revenant
    So Ben randomly pops up with the fact that he wants a "penny sorter," which my brain interprets to mean one of those automatic coin sorting and rolling machines.
    I hadn't thought of those in years probably but him saying this reminded me of the fact that I used to see those in Walgreens and other places as a kid. I always really wanted one and thought they would be so cool, but I could just never justify it (or talk my mom into it) and so I always just sorted, counted and rolled by hand. To this day I've never owned one. But the whole thing and the memories brought an immediate smile to my face.
    Ben wanted to use my phone's Amazon app to look at some/ shop for one, just like he likes to for toys so we looked together. It looks like they no longer make ones like the ones that I used to want as a kid - makes sense after 20-25 years that the designs have moved on / progressed.
    Before we started shopping for and laying down a lot of money from savings to buy the new house I probably would have talked to Shandy and maybe gotten one for $25 for a laugh. But, Ben has been acting more than slightly spoiled lately with his toy demands and the house purchase IS burning through a lot of money. So at this point I'm just not interested in buying something we 100% do not need and which is just going to sit around until I have to pack it up to move in 2 months.
    The other thing is this kid already has like 3 piggy banks / coin banks and he really just does NOT need another bank at home.
    In our increasingly cashless society I sometimes wonder how many kids still get piggy banks? But these things must still be common / popular enough if they're still being offered for sale in so many varieties.
  5. Revenant

    “PIF by Borrower”

    By Revenant,

    For months now I’ve been crossing my fingers hoping that I’d get a nice bonus and we’d be able to pay off my student loans and maybe finish paying for the cruise we’re wanting to take in October.
    I’m still waiting to find out about if I’ll get a bonus this year, but we just got a big surprise on our Taxes. Because we can claim an extra dependent this year and a couple of other things this year, instead of owing money we’re going to get some back and this is going to let us pay off my loans, pay off the cruise and have a little left over. We may be able to use that to eliminate one other debt and, if we can, that’d be three big bills / debts off our plate.
    I have to wait until the money comes in and we can’t file until we get one last form, but my student loans are as good as dead - 6 years early. My reward for paying 2.5 times the normal payment every month that I could afford it.
    “PIF by borrower” are wonderful words.
    … Now to start working harder on her student loans. That… will take a while and be fun.
    Hey, maybe, if I do get a bonus, I really will get to treat myself a little!
    As it happens, just in the last couple of days, an NGC graded 1880 10G coin has come up for sale in an old fatty holder with a 1959XX serial number. I’d be a perfect addition to my set but the seller’s asking price is a bit steep. If I get a good bonus, I may try to make an offer and see if they’ll take something more reasonable for it. If I don’t get a bonus and it’s still available in a few weeks I may just negotiate a deal with my wife, just like I did when I got the 1888 in early 2018.
    If it’s still available when I’m ready to buy, I’ll be really excited to get that coin. But getting rid of these bills will feel great.
    I do sometimes question if I’d be better served to have put even more towards the bills and less than I currently do to the coins and the hobbies, but this is my fun, this is how I treat myself, and there are worse ways I could do it.
    Yup... I'm probably going to have a hard time using most of that grading credit if I keep going for things that are already graded.
  6. Revenant

    Zimbabwean Coins Set and Traveler’s Check Sets

    By Revenant,


    Zimbabwean Coins and Currency
    I said in a recent post that I’d be looking to buy some Zimbabwe coins from a dealer in the US that I’ve used a lot and get those submitted. Then, to my surprise, when I went to order, I found that they’d upped their prices and upped their minimum order from $50 to $100. Yeah, they offer free shipping, but, sheesh. Let me have the option to pay the shipping for a smaller order. I wanted to order 2 sets of coins and some notes for about $55. I had not wanted to or planned to spend $100 and buy 3-4 sets… So, I just didn’t.
    Having looked into this more, I’m finding that I may not be able to get those 10-coin sets in uncirc. condition anywhere else for less than about $25/set, where with that dealer I can get them for about $20/set - $18 if I wait for one of their frequent sales. Also, I increasingly like the idea of getting 3 sets, getting one graded and keep 2 raw – one for each boy.
    So, I might just hold my nose and put in a larger order soon. And now I feel a bit silly for getting such a stick up my butt about it, but it didn’t feel right at the time and so I’ll stand by that choice.
    While I’m changing up my plans and waiting on a sale – probably a few weeks, Mother’s day and Father’s day will probably shake out something – I decided to grab a bunch of the 2014 bond coins. I’m going to try to submit these all together and have a bunch of them labeled -001 to -015 on the same invoice – an idea I’m stealing from Fenntucky Mike’s comment on my Traveler Check plans. I found a seller offering 5 sets of 5 Bond Coins for $28 so I ordered that and used my eBay bucks – 25 coins for about $23.50 after my bucks. Not bad. I’ll keep 4 sets Raw probably and organize 1 10-coin set and 2 5-coin Bond coin sets into a 20-coin album page and one day Ben and Sam will each get one, I think.
    Even if I pull that off though I don’t think they’ll be listed from -001 to -015 in the set just because of the… slightly odd? way NGC lists / orders the slots and includes the bond coins and the fact that there’s a couple of varieties / designs of some denominations… It would make more sense to me to have the Bond Coins listed together at the end. This may be worth chasing up with NGC to see if they’d re-order the slots.

    Maybe I need to try to just get them all together first… but I need to get moving on placing that order and getting these soon, I think. Getting lower tier things through seems to be taking a while lately and I’d ideally like to have more than one coin in my Zimbabwe coin set for 2021. That dime did the heavy lifting for 2020 but that’s an awfully lonely looking coin.
    I think that would help make for a cool set. My working title for the coin set is going to be “The Early Victims of Hyperinflation,” or “Extinct Due to Hyperinflation” a reference to the fact that Zimbabwean coins went the way of the Dodo a lot sooner / faster than their notes did, as coins always do.
    I’ve gone ahead and done the paperwork to submit the Zimbabwe traveler’s checks (P-15 to P-20) – without waiting on P-40 and P-45 – because I just don’t want to keep holding these up. I’m going to ship them in large BCW top loaders for protection and I’ve requested / ordered some small flat rate USPS boxes, which I think should be pretty much the perfect size for this job and the small coin submissions I’m hoping to do soon. I’m submitting all 12 checks but doing each set of P-15 to P-20 on separate forms so they’ll be two sets numbered -001 to -006 and I’ll get to fill two competitive sets with them. The best of each will go in the “Gradually, Then Suddenly” and I might make a signature set will all ~13 I’ll have at that point.
    Between getting some orders placed, having flips to put coins in already and having shipping supplies coming it feels good to be rapidly making several material steps towards getting these things done and actually using the 2020 grading credits, unlike the 2019 one. But… 2020 was just rough. But I do also feel it was a personal failure to let that drag on for months while my anxiety over putting those coins in the mail quietly got the better of me.
    The box with the 10G coins was delivered to NGC on 4/5 and their latest update says they’re opening the mail from 4/1 and 4/2 presently. So I’m hoping they’ll show in the system soon.

  7. Revenant

    Yesterday’s Delivery

    By Revenant,


    2020 Awards
    So, unlike with the PMG plaque, which arrived on 2/27 - much to my shock – I can’t really call this one a surprise in the mail. I’d seen other’s posting about getting theirs on Monday and Tuesday, so I knew the arrival of this package was probably imminent. Still, it was great to get it.
    My home office and my windows sit almost directly above the front door to the house, so I heard the carrier scanning the barcodes and the beeping as it was dropped off and I wondered in that moment if that’s what it was because I wasn’t expecting anything else in the mail today.
    I didn’t open it right away. I took it upstairs and stuck it in the bedroom to wait until after the kids were asleep. I will likely repeat what I did last year and try to get a shot of the two boys together this year holding the two plaques for this year now that I have both, but I wanted to get a minute and just enjoy opening this and looking at it in peace myself. I opened the PMG plaque with Sam around and it took a while before he let me have it back.


    So, here’s the coin:

    A MS64 1881-S Morgan, which will be quite a partner / buddy for my MS64 1882-S Morgan.  I'm now ranked in the top 1,700 for Morgan sets in the registry. It's straight to the top now! #1 set, 2021 awards!
    I had guessed that the coin would be a 1 or 2 ounce graded silver NCLT from 2020. I was wrong and very pleasantly surprised. Fenntucky Mike posted an image of his full slab and (unsurprisingly) looks like all these Award Winner coins have the same 7-digit invoice number and they’re numbered 001 through… 50? I think? He got number -008 and I have -022. Gary appears to have -034.I wonder who got -001? Who got the last / highest number. I'm sure it was all random but it is funny to think about.
    (Edited to add this bit, which I'd said as a comment elsewhere) Honestly, the sheer number of coins they had to give away - and the unstated expectation that everyone would be getting the same / mostly the same thing - is the main reason I was REALLY expecting the coin to be 2020 NCLT, just because those would fit because of the year and would be easy to get in an arbitrarily large number in the same basic grade / condition (69/70).They really surprised me with this one, managing to give 50+ people MS64 Morgans from San Francisco from just a couple of years, but, as Gary said, they are more common dates. Even then, I really wonder if it was at all "interesting" to round them up and how they went about it - Did they go into the market for RAW coins until they had enough MS64s? Did they buy some of their previously graded MS64's on the market? A little of both?
    When the PMG plaque arrived I posted a shot of the 5 together and Fenntucky Mike said something along the lines of I’d need another or a bigger shelf soon. I shifted some things around, cleaned up my desk, and popped over to Michael’s to buy another stand last month, so here is my proof. I made it work (for now). If NGC or PMG are nice enough to give me something next year I'll cross that bridge and deal with that “problem” when the time comes.

    I also got the new certificates in the mail over the weekend. So far, I’ve managed to keep track of all the certificates I’ve gotten since 2016 – including now 5 certificates for the 10G set for all the years since my marriage and Ben's birth.. 
    Thanks again to NGC! Thanks again for those who read these and say they like it / what I write.
    The version of myself that Joined the registry in 2007, the version of myself that started this journal as a 20 year old, did not, and would not have imagined this. Not what’s sitting on my desk hutch now, not my life as it is now, not my wife or my sons, not this past year.
    I’m not done yet! More to come!
    Side note, but one of Shandy’s current obsessions is our next housing situation. With our current lease up on 3/31/2022 she’s looking to move us closer to her parents for more access to free baby-sitting and more date nights. So there’s a good chance that, if I win anything next year – be it plaques or certificates – they’ll be delivered to the new address / the new home or subject to mail forwarding. But we’re hoping that will be the last home – for the foreseeable future anyway. She was looking at this last night even!
    I think Ben’s Beyblade collection now numbers 19 – with three more seemingly lost forever in some magical void that only children can access in some 1-way capacity. I’m pretty committed to not buying more but he does get a weekly allowance now so what ne does with his allowance is his business!
  8. Revenant
    Sam’s intensive therapy is over. Yay! His last day was actually the Thursday I posted about getting the plaque in the mail. Three weeks of stress and crying and having a generally unhappy 2-year-old can end – but it was for his own good, and he did great. He’s supposed to continue to wear a cast and restrict his left hand one day a week and one meal a day to continue the development of motor skills with his right hand, but that hopefully won’t be as contentious.
    Shandy and I both got the first CoVID shot (both Moderna) in March and we’re getting the 2nd dose on 4/20 and 5/1 respectively. So, we’ll be fully vaccinated by mid-May and we’re looking forward to getting to go out to eat again soon and to actually do something fun for her birthday in mid-June. We’re also hoping that we’ll really get to go on a cruise this year, unlike last year. I will still have missed two local coin shows that happened in January or March but… such is life.
    Last year I’d attended a show in the Woodlands area in January and talked to a dealer about seeing them again at a show in March to see if they’d found any of the key-date 10G coins I needed in their inventory. I never got to go to that show in March because of CoVID and now I’ve had to miss the January and March shows this year. And… this is why we get contact info, people! Stupid virus…
    The European pocket change from PawPaw is now fully mixed in with the coins I’ve had for years from my grandfather and others. I managed to not need another binder after all.  I vaguely remember thinking maybe I made a mistake by getting such a large / thick binder in the first place. I don’t feel that way now! That binder is heavy though!

    Also: 2x2s Forevah! Flips only for submissions as to not make NGC annoyed.
    But… What I feel like the big news is is that we’ll probably be moving much sooner than expected now.
    Shandy poked me to ask out landlady what terms / requirements she’d put on letting us out of our lease early (11 months early) and I did. We fully expected her to hold us to the terms of the lease and we wouldn’t be able to leave early, but she’d like to sell and she’s willing to let us vacate pretty much as soon as we want with 1 month of notice so she can list the house, get it ready and flip it.
    So… It looks like we may be leaving this house in May – next freaking month. OMG! The reason she pressured me and the reason why we’re looking to move now rather than later is so that we don’t have to move during Ben’s Kindergarten year. She wants to minimize the disruption to him, which I completely understand. It also has implications for Sam’s timing of entry into pre-school in early 2022.
    So… yeah. That escalated very fast… this afternoon! I texted the landlady in the late morning and she called me back at 12:15 PM and we were pre-approved for a loan by 1:30-ish.

    Is it horrible that I just keep mentally going back to the implications this has for the return shipping / timing on my current and planned NGC and PMG submissions? Is that horrible? That that is a major thing in my head as all of this is going on?
    This is the only home Ben has ever known. He does not remember the place before this, the place we brought him home to and left when he was 18 months old. Now we’re looking to leave here when Sam is just a little older than that, and it is funny to think that Sam likely won’t remember this place. I think this is the 5th home I've had since starting this journal and the next one will be number 6.
    … Time to buy some moving boxes I guess.
    Also: As of this morning, this journal has surpassed 10,000 views. Wow. That feels like a lot. I wonder how much of that is me?
     
  9. Revenant
    In looking at that 1880 10G coin I picked up a couple of weeks ago now one thing kind of stood out to me.

    There’s something on the left side of the Obverse that looks a lot like a die crack that runs between the K and one of the stars.
    Unlike a lot of the things you see people posting about in the Newbie forum you can actually see this with a naked eye and I think it really is a die crack and not a scratch - but I could be wrong. Looking closer under high magnification it looks like there may be some additional small cracks around the K.
    Funny aside, but I commented on seeing this to my wife and she was asking if this made me unhappy or made me like the coin less. Not at all as it happens, but it’s very interesting to me.
    Seeing this got me thinking about the topic of die pairings - you hear people talk about die pairings and die varieties with other series that have been studied extensively but you don’t really hear about it with this set / series. It occurred to me that this might be attributable to the fact that this series isn’t heavily “collected” by all indications and they’re mostly treated like bullion. Then another thought occurred to me: Are there actually die pairings to research with these coins?
    The annual mintages for this series are as follows:
    1875: 4,110,000
    1876: 1,581,106
    1877: 1,108,049
    1879: 581,036
    1880: 50,100
    1885: 67,095
    1886: 51,141
    1887: 40,754
    1888: 35,585
    1889: 204,691
    Die life is a highly variable thing and depends on the size of the coin, the material of the coin and the time period in which it was produced. The mere existence of the 1879/7 variety shows that they weren’t making the 581,000 coins struck in 1879 from a single pair of dies. However, from what I can find with a little looking, it seems like in the 1880s, for a small gold coin, a die life of 50,000 or more would have been very reasonable and achievable.
    This means it’s possible and maybe even likely that all the coins in this series from 1880, 1885, 1886, 1887, and 1888 were all struck from a single pair of dies and that there are no dies to look at. It seems obvious to think about this now, but it’d never occurred to me before.
    If that’s true, and if I’m right about this being a die crack, that suggests that, if you could get and look at enough examples, you might be able to look at the progression of that crack over the course of the run and you could distinguish coins from early or late in the production run for 1880 based on the state / presence / absence of this crack.
    Trying to track down more examples and test this out might be fun in 30 years when I’ve made my millions.
     
  10. Revenant
    I just picked up a 2016 Proof SAE for Ben’s birth year. My mother-in-law gave me a 2019 proof that she bought when she visited the mint at the end of last year. That gave me one for Sam’s birth year and I got a 1986 - for our birth year - years ago.
    Ben smashing the capsule for the 1986 the other week - forcing me to go shopping for replacement capsules - was what got this back on my mind, but it had been on my collecting agenda since I was given the 2019. Cash was a bit tighter back then and I had some other, (more pressing IMO at the time) collecting goals, but we’re in a good enough place now, for now, I think.
    Ben has continued to show interest in those proof SAEs in the mint boxes and was asking if he could have one to keep in his room. With the 2016 coming out of the 3-day quarantine we impose on all mail these days I’m going to let him keep the 2016 on his dresser. He may make me regret that but… at least when I bought a new capsule for the 1986 coin I bought 6… We opened the box together and now it's going to sit on a spot on his dresser that he picked for it - next to his other treasures, some of which are stolen from my old mini collection and other places.


    At this point, I have the 1/4th oz gold eagles in MS70 and these proof SAEs in the mint packaging for both boys. I considered going and getting PF70 graded proof SAEs and or MS70 1/10th oz gold eagles or PF70 1/10th oz or 1/4th ounce eagles for both of them. There’s really no shortage of coins made on their birth years that I could get for both of them but in so doing I’m going to try to make sure that anything I get and hold on to for one of them I get for the other one. I would hate for one of them to feel slighted in that regard when they reach adulthood.
    I’m still trying to complete several sets of the 2 oz silver queen’s beasts coins. I also took a major step closer to that recently - using a small part of that “Economic Impact Payment” to make an order with JM Bullion to get the rest of the Yales and most of the White Lions I need. At least one of each of these 5 sets will be ear-marked for each boy, but there are scenarios where each boy could end up getting 2 or 3 sets of them - now that we’re capped out at 2 kids I find that I’m building more sets than I probably want or need. But… silver is silver…
    My wife has challenged me on the point of fairness regarding the sets I’m wanting to let each of them have. I’m hoping to let Ben have my 10G set and Sam have the Zimbabwe note set. My wife pointed out that giving one of the boys a group of gold coins and giving the other one a group of demonetized notes from a dead currency wouldn’t exactly be “fair.” My response was that, at that point, Ben would get the 10G set and Sam would get most of the rest of the gold coins - and that would give both of them a roughly equal number of gold coins and a roughly equal melt weight, at least as things stand now. I can adjust as time goes on.
    I’m not going to deliberately create a situation where one of them gets shafted too badly.
    Hopefully they like it and keep it and don’t just take it all down to the pawn shop as soon as they get it. That would be quite the anti-climax after all of this work. At least I’ll be dead for some or all of that.  

  11. Revenant
    Around the start of our self-isolation my hair had been getting really long and my wife convinced me to just let her and Ben use the trimmer on me and make it short - finally lean into the hair loss that has been eating into my temples for 10 years. At the time I’d shaved my beard.

    Recently they did another pass to keep it short and I saw a picture of myself…

    Then I looked at the coins I collect, and I thought a little…

    Then I went to Google and Bing for photos…

    That’s not fair! That ain’t right! When I started building this set, I was 22 and I had hair on my temples! Curse you, male pattern baldness! Curse you!

    My wife says I have the hair but not the nose!  
    Anyway... I hope that was good for a laugh for someone!
    Stay safe. Stay healthy. Today was day 43 of self-isolation for us.
     
     
  12. Revenant
    I've pretty much made up my mind that, before the year is out, I want to get my 10G set reholdered in scratch-resistant holders to harmonize the look of the set. I'm considering having them review the ones in old fatty holders to see if they might be able to pick up a point - this would be especially nice with the MS64 1887. I'm not sure how the best way to do this would be because, even if the grade doesn't change, I'd still want it cracked out and reholdered - There's just little point to me if the whole set doesn't come back in the same type of holder. I'd on the fence about using this / taking the opportunity to roll the dice on reholdering the PCGS 1875 - even having bought the newer NGC graded 1875 I don't think this issue / question will ever fully get out of my head.

    The thought of putting 8 coins that I've spent nearly $3,000 and 12 years gathering together in a box and handing it to USPS has me pretty nervous. In the same box I'll probably also be sending some Civil War tokens and one other small gold coin for grading.
    I'm absolutely going to send them via registered mail when I do this. That said though, I think I'd have to take the box to the Post Office and ship it in person to do that, and that's something I really don't want to do right now with the CoVID cases so high in Texas right now. I'm sure that some would say I'm being paranoid but I'm still just not going to expose myself more than I have to right now.
    The cruse my wife and I had planned on going on in October is officially canceled and we're working on making other plans to have a little get-away where we can also be alone in the hillcountry and limit our exposure to other people. With the no-sail orders already extending to 9/30 and the spike in cases it just seemed like the best thing to do.
    I don't know that I've said much on this front in quite some time but Sam continues to flourish and impress his PT and OT. When we started to self-isolate in March he was just starting to roll over and sit up on his own. He finally got to where he could stay in quad (on all fours) good in April, started crawling and pulling up to standing in May and was cruising (taking steps while holding something for balance) by late June. He's now standing without holding something for 3-4 seconds with increasing confidence and I expect he'll be starting to walk independently in the near future. He's showing some cognitive and speech delays but we'll continue to work on that.

  13. Revenant
    Around the time I ordered that Lunar Monkey coin for Ben's birthyear I saw that a seller had listed 5 2019 Lunar 2 Pig coins that had the Early Release label. That was pretty much exactly what I wanted for Sam's year as an equivalent piece. One of the five sold almost immediately but there were four left and I felt pretty safe with that and I decided to wait and see if I could hold out for a 5% eBay bucks deal - always nice if you can pick up some cashback on things, right?
    About a week later 2 other coins sold in rapid succession and, at that point, I decided to stop waiting and pick up one of the last two - $2 in eBay bucks wasn't worth possibly missing out on what I wanted.
    Shortly after I bought mine - within a few days anyway - the seller listed 5 more of them for sale, but increased the price from $50 to $55. The price increase is more than twice what I was hoping I might be able to snag in eBay bucks for next month.
    So I got lucky this time, but holding out and hoping I could game things very nearly cost me an extra $5.

    I don't know if it's supply chain disruptions or production disruptions because of Covid-19, or everyone spending their Stimulus and bonus unemployment, or what, but it feels like a lot of the things I want to try to pick up for fun for us and Ben & Sam are sold out lately. Target has sold out of the nerf guns we got recently and now they sold out of the smaller nerf pistols I was looking at. They've sold out of the water guns we got before - I was going to get more of both so more of us could all play together with the grandparents and uncles. Amazon is out of the baby shark toys like what my mother got Sam (which they were fighting over) - all three colors of it… I don’t know that I’ve ever seen this before.
     
  14. Revenant
    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.
  15. Revenant
    A couple of weeks ago now I received the award I'd referenced previously. In true 2020 fashion I got to receive a professional award in a Punisher tshirt and sweatpants.

    Because the organization wanted good pictures with the newsletter we had to re-do this in a suit and I got the whole family in on it.

    As the corresponding (and surviving) author, both plaques were sent to me and its my task to mail the other plaque(s) to the other author(s), or, in my case, to his family.
    While that is something I definitely don't class as "happy" I'm going to try to make something a little more positive come out of this and use the trip to the post office to mail off a coin submission while I'm at it. Because, yes, that thing I came up with the plan to do in July, which I said I'd do in mid-October, is still not done. However! Using this as motivation, I did get myself to fill out the first of the invoices I need to do today. I did the one for reholdering the 10G coins. I need / want to make out a couple more for some Civil War tokens and a gold coin I want to submit.
    This has me thinking about how I want to ship them. Part of me thinks it silly to worry about proper shipping / packing when they'll be cracked out and reholdered on arrival but I'm also going to be sending some other things in the same box... but then... maybe that's a bad idea. Maybe I should just bite the bullet on shipping and ship the tokens and raw gold separately...
    Of course... literally as I write this I'm finding out in the near term that this is academic for now. Apparently there's a chance my nephew has Covid (we'll know in a week) and my wife saw him just a few days before he started showing signs... So... as I write this, I realize I'm probably not going to get to do much or go anywhere for a few days... She saw him just a little before the contagious window was supposed to start if it is Covid but we have nowhere to go now and no one to see regardless. Everyone else in our circle is going to be quarantining now.
    Joy. No more small private birthday party or bouncy house for the boys this weekend... Ben is going to be very disappointed... He isn't going to get to see his cousins now.
     
     
  16. Revenant
    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.
  17. Revenant
    She loves to travel and she desperately wants to get out and take a trip somewhere and is brainstorming all of these ideas about where to go and what to do when this is over.
    She's looking at taking a vacation for a long weekend to Colorado. In the middle of her research she figured out that the ANA Money Museum is in Colorado and she's trying to use a day there to tempt me into getting excited and agreeing to the idea.
    Does she know me too well or think I sell too cheap? That is the question.
    Edited to add:
    She later asked me, "What does ANA stand for anyway?" I've been married to this woman for 4 years, folks. Doesn't even know what ANA is. Just thinks "Money Museum" is enough to get me interested.
  18. Revenant
    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.)
  19. Revenant

    Test of Concept With the Ring Light:

    By Revenant,


    Coin Photography
    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.)
  20. Revenant
    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."  
  21. Revenant
    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!
  22. Revenant

    I have a coin for that...

    By Revenant,


    Family
    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.

  23. Revenant

    Happy Father's Day

    By Revenant,


    Family
    I know quite a few of us that frequent this place are also fathers. Shandy let me sleep in this morning and, when I got up, she had the boys in Star Wars shirts saying "I am your Son" and one for me that says "I am your Father."

    I mentioned elsewhere that I had an ebay auction ending late last night. I followed my practice of putting in my best number and going to bed. It so happened that, when I put in my best bid, i was winning it but my bid was maxed out and if anyone else had bid I would have lost. I still wasn't willing to stay up to 1 AM biting my nails and I still wasn't willing to up my bid, so I decided to just see in the morning. It turns out I won.
    The thing I was after? A P-12a note for my Zimbabwe set.

    The thing that makes this exciting? This was the last note I needed to have a complete variety set of Zimbabwe 1st dollar Series 2 notes. When I get this in the mail I'll have all 11.
     
    It feels particularly fitting to score this last note on the morning of Father's Day since it's for a set that I got back into in a big way as a way of coping with stress during the 2nd pregnancy and Sam's NICU stay and everything that came later.










    I'd always thought it would take me longer and cost me more to get to this point with this set but I've gotten lucky of late - a couple of dealers I buy from have been listing a lot of these lately and I've had some money I could get away with spending so I've, during quarantine, gotten the P-5a, the P-7, the P-9, the P-11a and now the P-12a, moving from being about 50% complete to now having them all.
    Of course, I'm still not done with the Series 1 varieties. There's 18 varieties in Series 1 and I have 7 of them... but, maybe, one day.
  24. Revenant
    Off-topic but...
    Some days it begins to feel like a game of "What has my 4 year old managed to get me charged for this time?"
    A couple of months ago he managed to get us signed up to Amazon Music for a month.
    Last month he managed to upgrade my Netflix account to "Premium" - so now we can have 3 screens going at once instead of 2 - and it costs me $3 more a month.
    I was just looking at one of the credit card bills, seeing a 5 dollar charge and thinking, "Oh no... What did he tell Alexa this time?" - Turns out it wasn't that it was just a tip for the grocery delivery driver.
    Why can't these kids do something useful? Like get into my eBay watch list on my Phone's App and buy somethings while giving me deniability???  I could at least enjoy that!
  25. Revenant

    The Canadian Quarter…

    By Revenant,


    Random Nonsense
    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.