Revenant

So I'm probably going to come off like a bit of a "super judger" (as my wife puts it) while also preaching to the choir a bit, but I wanted to post about the work I've been doing on my Half Cent set recently.
I said recently that my wife gave me a 1955 Rhodesian Half Cent, following up on the 1957 and 1958 she'd given me at Christmas, buying things I'd put on my watch list. 
Putting this coin in my set put it in the #1 spot in the category. And so, it was a #1 ranked set for me - with none of my own photos, just NGC photos, no set banner image, no set description and no coin descriptions.
This happened in large part because I hadn't been focusing on this - I'd been focusing on buying and working on coins for another set that I'm also researching at the moment and I'm going to build it out as a phase 3 to what I've done with Zimbabwe and Venezuela. But then this new set snuck up on me, going from 20% complete and rank 5 to 80% complete and rank 1, driven completely by my wife, who knew I liked them and had heard me talking about them.
But once it was #1, I really felt a need to table some of the other stuff for a while, get pictures of these, and build out a presentation for the set. Because - I really think, if you made a #1 ranked set, you should make it worth looking at and fun to look at if you're at all able too - no shade intended at those that can't get a good photo of a coin, perhaps just because they don't have the equipment. But it is just so much nicer to click on a #1 ranked, 100% complete set and see gorgeous, lustrous, detailed, close-up photos. And I love that NGC made it easy to pop-in their verification photos... but that's photos are just not as good as what many of us can produce and they often do not do a good job of showing off the coin. Those photos are produced in a quick, generic, assembly line kind of way and you're not going to get the best images of a particular coin unless you're taking your time with each coin - something NGC just can't afford to do unless you're paying them an extra fee for their high-end photos.
And so, that's what I've done and built and at this point the set presentation is more or less finished and built. I have at least 1 more coin description to get to, as I'm about to get to.
Getting the 1955 meant I only had one more coin - the 1956 - left to get to complete the set. So getting that coin moved up my priority list in a big way after the 14th of last month.
As I started looking into building a presentation for the set, one of the things I like to look at and reference is the mintage for each year.
And that brought something to my attention - the 1956, the only coin I hadn't acquired, the only coin I hadn't even really seen for sale, is also the lowest mintage year with only 480,000 made that year. The next lowest had 720,000 made - 50% more - and all the other years were in the 1-2.5 million range. 
And, coincidentally, as I was looking at all of this and figuring all this out, a seller I've bought several of these Rhodesian coins from listed a 1956 in MS65RB. For reference, there are no coins at MS66 or above presently, there's a single MS65RD graded by NGC and only about 3 MS65RBs. So, this was one of the better NGC-graded examples.
So I immediately wanted that coin, and I have some hobby money saved up and I was ready to bid aggressively to get it, since it was an auction. Because, I'm not sure how long I might have to wait to see another one this good - maybe not long, maybe quite a while.
Turns out I didn't need to worry - no one else bid and no one fought me for it. But the set is now complete. 
I won the coin last weekend, and it arrived on Wednesday. I took some time last night to get pictures taken and edited to go with the pictures I took of the others last week. And so, here it is. I just need to get that last description finished.

And so the next post will probably focus on what I've been working on now that this is done.

Okay, so, after several rounds of going back and forth between “Grading/Quality Control,” “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging,” and “Quality Control/Finalized,” the submission is finally finalized and shipped, and I have grades.
On a few of them, all I can say is… Woof…
For Italy…
While these mostly are not great I can’t call most of these disappointments. Yeah… the 1995 is lower than I’d hoped for, but the 2000 and 2001 are better than I’d worried they might be. At the end of the day those were a play to at least get the set finished. All three coins are having to go through NGCs review process to add to the registry because none of those three have ever been added to the set before. The 5L was a disappointment – I thought that would do better. But I’m happy with the 10L.
Most importantly - I have made the 500L set I built for my wife 100% complete, including coins her family brought back with them from Italy 30 years ago. I like it.

The Venezuelan coins are where this hurts – Pretty much all MS66s, and so these fall short of what I needed to take back the #1 set with that Best Presented Set… So… maybe next year we’ll try to reclaim the title:

The Argentinian Coins… Again… Overall not what I’d hoped for… but… They’re still going to let me fill out a set with a fun narrative. For the Austral Anyway… I’m taking another look at the Peso Convertible and realizing how many slots that set has for circulating commemoratives I have zero interest in hunting down. Lol
The 63s and the 64s hurt… but the Zimbabwe set also started with some less than stellar and humble grades and such… and I’ve improved from there where I could. 
Once again... we'll call this a foundation to grow from... maybe... We'll see how much I feel like torturing myself and my wallet.


Speaking of the Zimbabwe set, the $10 coin scored! Kind of! – It got an MS62. Which beats the AU58 that I had before and it is now the TOP POP, highest graded example graded by NGC. I had been hoping this would grade MS and not AU like the last one, and it did. So, this is kind of a win… but I had hoped it might MS63.  
Seriously though, finding examples.of these that do not look rough has been hard. I've been trying... for a few years now.

And finally, we have the turtle coins… Mostly 66s. I can’t really complain too much here. I didn’t really expect too many super high grades here and I mostly just wanted these to maybe form the basis for a future signature set. Yes, high grades are nice, but they’re not essential for a non-competitive set…. that I’m not even officially building yet… and they’re still Gem Uncirc grades.
But... Hey! That Tokelau Cent! MS67RD!

Next goals will be..
1) getting the coins programmed in and in the slots,
2) getting my pre-written descriptions posted on the coins,
3) getting pictures taken of the 500 Lire coins to polish the presentation on that set,
4) pictures on the new Venezuelan coins to maintain the quality of the presentation on that set,
5) getting the Austral coins (and maybe the Pesos) imaged and
6) getting my historical write-ups for the Austral Set ready.
These may not all happen in this order.

Okay, so, after several rounds of going back and forth between “Grading/Quality Control,” “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging,” and “Quality Control/Finalized,” the submission is finally finalized and shipped, and I have grades.
On a few of them, all I can say is… Woof…
For Italy…
While these mostly are not great I can’t call most of these disappointments. Yeah… the 1995 is lower than I’d hoped for, but the 2000 and 2001 are better than I’d worried they might be. At the end of the day those were a play to at least get the set finished. All three coins are having to go through NGCs review process to add to the registry because none of those three have ever been added to the set before. The 5L was a disappointment – I thought that would do better. But I’m happy with the 10L.
Most importantly - I have made the 500L set I built for my wife 100% complete, including coins her family brought back with them from Italy 30 years ago. I like it.

The Venezuelan coins are where this hurts – Pretty much all MS66s, and so these fall short of what I needed to take back the #1 set with that Best Presented Set… So… maybe next year we’ll try to reclaim the title:

The Argentinian Coins… Again… Overall not what I’d hoped for… but… They’re still going to let me fill out a set with a fun narrative. For the Austral Anyway… I’m taking another look at the Peso Convertible and realizing how many slots that set has for circulating commemoratives I have zero interest in hunting down. Lol
The 63s and the 64s hurt… but the Zimbabwe set also started with some less than stellar and humble grades and such… and I’ve improved from there where I could. 
Once again... we'll call this a foundation to grow from... maybe... We'll see how much I feel like torturing myself and my wallet.


Speaking of the Zimbabwe set, the $10 coin scored! Kind of! – It got an MS62. Which beats the AU58 that I had before and it is now the TOP POP, highest graded example graded by NGC. I had been hoping this would grade MS and not AU like the last one, and it did. So, this is kind of a win… but I had hoped it might MS63.  
Seriously though, finding examples.of these that do not look rough has been hard. I've been trying... for a few years now.

And finally, we have the turtle coins… Mostly 66s. I can’t really complain too much here. I didn’t really expect too many super high grades here and I mostly just wanted these to maybe form the basis for a future signature set. Yes, high grades are nice, but they’re not essential for a non-competitive set…. that I’m not even officially building yet… and they’re still Gem Uncirc grades.
But... Hey! That Tokelau Cent! MS67RD!

Next goals will be..
1) getting the coins programmed in and in the slots,
2) getting my pre-written descriptions posted on the coins,
3) getting pictures taken of the 500 Lire coins to polish the presentation on that set,
4) pictures on the new Venezuelan coins to maintain the quality of the presentation on that set,
5) getting the Austral coins (and maybe the Pesos) imaged and
6) getting my historical write-ups for the Austral Set ready.
These may not all happen in this order.

Okay, so, after several rounds of going back and forth between “Grading/Quality Control,” “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging,” and “Quality Control/Finalized,” the submission is finally finalized and shipped, and I have grades.
On a few of them, all I can say is… Woof…
For Italy…
While these mostly are not great I can’t call most of these disappointments. Yeah… the 1995 is lower than I’d hoped for, but the 2000 and 2001 are better than I’d worried they might be. At the end of the day those were a play to at least get the set finished. All three coins are having to go through NGCs review process to add to the registry because none of those three have ever been added to the set before. The 5L was a disappointment – I thought that would do better. But I’m happy with the 10L.
Most importantly - I have made the 500L set I built for my wife 100% complete, including coins her family brought back with them from Italy 30 years ago. I like it.

The Venezuelan coins are where this hurts – Pretty much all MS66s, and so these fall short of what I needed to take back the #1 set with that Best Presented Set… So… maybe next year we’ll try to reclaim the title:

The Argentinian Coins… Again… Overall not what I’d hoped for… but… They’re still going to let me fill out a set with a fun narrative. For the Austral Anyway… I’m taking another look at the Peso Convertible and realizing how many slots that set has for circulating commemoratives I have zero interest in hunting down. Lol
The 63s and the 64s hurt… but the Zimbabwe set also started with some less than stellar and humble grades and such… and I’ve improved from there where I could. 
Once again... we'll call this a foundation to grow from... maybe... We'll see how much I feel like torturing myself and my wallet.


Speaking of the Zimbabwe set, the $10 coin scored! Kind of! – It got an MS62. Which beats the AU58 that I had before and it is now the TOP POP, highest graded example graded by NGC. I had been hoping this would grade MS and not AU like the last one, and it did. So, this is kind of a win… but I had hoped it might MS63.  
Seriously though, finding examples.of these that do not look rough has been hard. I've been trying... for a few years now.

And finally, we have the turtle coins… Mostly 66s. I can’t really complain too much here. I didn’t really expect too many super high grades here and I mostly just wanted these to maybe form the basis for a future signature set. Yes, high grades are nice, but they’re not essential for a non-competitive set…. that I’m not even officially building yet… and they’re still Gem Uncirc grades.
But... Hey! That Tokelau Cent! MS67RD!

Next goals will be..
1) getting the coins programmed in and in the slots,
2) getting my pre-written descriptions posted on the coins,
3) getting pictures taken of the 500 Lire coins to polish the presentation on that set,
4) pictures on the new Venezuelan coins to maintain the quality of the presentation on that set,
5) getting the Austral coins (and maybe the Pesos) imaged and
6) getting my historical write-ups for the Austral Set ready.
These may not all happen in this order.

Okay, so, after several rounds of going back and forth between “Grading/Quality Control,” “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging,” and “Quality Control/Finalized,” the submission is finally finalized and shipped, and I have grades.
On a few of them, all I can say is… Woof…
For Italy…
While these mostly are not great I can’t call most of these disappointments. Yeah… the 1995 is lower than I’d hoped for, but the 2000 and 2001 are better than I’d worried they might be. At the end of the day those were a play to at least get the set finished. All three coins are having to go through NGCs review process to add to the registry because none of those three have ever been added to the set before. The 5L was a disappointment – I thought that would do better. But I’m happy with the 10L.
Most importantly - I have made the 500L set I built for my wife 100% complete, including coins her family brought back with them from Italy 30 years ago. I like it.

The Venezuelan coins are where this hurts – Pretty much all MS66s, and so these fall short of what I needed to take back the #1 set with that Best Presented Set… So… maybe next year we’ll try to reclaim the title:

The Argentinian Coins… Again… Overall not what I’d hoped for… but… They’re still going to let me fill out a set with a fun narrative. For the Austral Anyway… I’m taking another look at the Peso Convertible and realizing how many slots that set has for circulating commemoratives I have zero interest in hunting down. Lol
The 63s and the 64s hurt… but the Zimbabwe set also started with some less than stellar and humble grades and such… and I’ve improved from there where I could. 
Once again... we'll call this a foundation to grow from... maybe... We'll see how much I feel like torturing myself and my wallet.


Speaking of the Zimbabwe set, the $10 coin scored! Kind of! – It got an MS62. Which beats the AU58 that I had before and it is now the TOP POP, highest graded example graded by NGC. I had been hoping this would grade MS and not AU like the last one, and it did. So, this is kind of a win… but I had hoped it might MS63.  
Seriously though, finding examples.of these that do not look rough has been hard. I've been trying... for a few years now.

And finally, we have the turtle coins… Mostly 66s. I can’t really complain too much here. I didn’t really expect too many super high grades here and I mostly just wanted these to maybe form the basis for a future signature set. Yes, high grades are nice, but they’re not essential for a non-competitive set…. that I’m not even officially building yet… and they’re still Gem Uncirc grades.
But... Hey! That Tokelau Cent! MS67RD!

Next goals will be..
1) getting the coins programmed in and in the slots,
2) getting my pre-written descriptions posted on the coins,
3) getting pictures taken of the 500 Lire coins to polish the presentation on that set,
4) pictures on the new Venezuelan coins to maintain the quality of the presentation on that set,
5) getting the Austral coins (and maybe the Pesos) imaged and
6) getting my historical write-ups for the Austral Set ready.
These may not all happen in this order.

This week has had emails from annoying clients every day right at the start of the day. Emails from clients that don't communicate internally so that your Point of Contact agrees to something but then never communicates that to the rest of their team, so you get questions about it for months. Clients that expect you to be at their beck and call and let them have meetings with you on 15 minutes notice. Clients that want meetings to discuss or clarify things that are clearly written in the report... not that they would know that because they never read the report, even when you told them in an email what section or what page to look at... That kind of thing.
However, I did get one bit of good news in the midst of this!

Huzzah!
We have made it to quality control! Grades soon! Maybe! - Probably!
I saw that it went to quality control on Tuesday, early in the morning, so I'm hoping that maybe tomorrow if I'm very lucky or maybe next week I'll see grades. I'm thinking next week is more likely. Week after next is possible. But I'm definitely feeling confident I'll have grades and maybe coins to take pictures of by early October!
Last week on Thursday I got a pink notice that USPS tried to deliver a package / envelope (LIES!!!) and so I was able to get out and collect it yesterday. As suspected it was my shipment of coins from a dealer in Hungary.
The coins are 2014 issues from New Caledonia. I'm going to make this easy on me (be lazy) and use the seller's images to show the coins for the most part.






I saw these online and thought they were very cool with the stylized, abstract turtle designs.
What the above images don't do a great job of showing is that the 2F and 5F coins are a golden-colored brass material that I've seen a fair bit of lately where the 10f, 20f, and 50f are silver-colored and probably made of zinc or nickel or plated steel. I'm not sure which yet.
The other thing I wasn't prepared for was the range in sizes involved - the 100f is actually quite massive, as is the 50f.
I'm not sure my picture below is doing a much better job of expressing the color difference (the 100f is an orange brass colored ring around a "silver" core, btw), but it should give you a feel for the range in the sizes.
I put the 2f coin at about 18 mm - same size range as a US dime - and the 100f coin around 38 mm - putting it in the same size bracket as a Morgan dollar, somewhat smaller than a lot of modern 1 oz silver bullion coins (~40-41 mm).

 
 

So.... This is long delayed, but I've been far busier at work than usual and we're having a lot of difficulties with Sam's health the last couple of weeks and months and so the journaling and the coin research is suffering.
Sam has been in decline since June. We think he has Slit Ventricle System (SVS) and he's dealing with almost daily debilitating headaches that are making him cranky and, in some cases, frankly, violent. Which just makes things hard. We're probably going to have to cancel a family vacation in October to have him hospitalized for weeks and in the meantime, we're stuck with pain management strategies that don't seem to be doing much good. That too, may tank any plans of actually making some of this work for this year, but, if it does, it does.
I also have a bad habit of making the perfect the enemy of the good enough and I've been letting that get in the way of just getting some pictures of these turtle coins I'm starting to work on imaged. But yesterday I just decided to make something happen and say, "good enough."
So, a quick update on the submission with about 35 coins I sent in:
7/5 - Shipped
7/10 - Delivered
7/27 - Showed as Received
8/3 - Payment Acknowledged
8/7 - Scheduled for Grading
The estimated times on this when I sent it in and when they acknowledged it suggest the submission will be finished around Mid-September to Early October. I'm mostly hoping that they just get home before November 1st so I can rush out some photos for the Argentine sets I'm planning, and the Venezuelan Set and the 500 Lire set I want to have more or less "finished."
The submission includes examples of the coins in the pictures that follow. These coins are ones that lost out to the ones I submitted so these are still home in flips while the ones we thought were the best are hopefully going to come back with some nice grades:
Colombia - 1000 Pesos

Cabo Verde - 1 Escudo. Sorry! These didn't come out good.

Tokelau - 1 Cent  - check out those die cracks on Queen Elizabeth's face! That die was tired!

Cayman Islands -

Congo - 1 Franc

1 Seniti 

I'm working on buying some more raw coins with stylized turtles on them. You'll almost never see me admit to shopping for something here until I've already bought it so I'm not talking yet.  
I tried showing these to Ben and he acted kind of interested and said they were cool but he was over it pretty fast. I don't think this moves the needle for him much. Maybe one day he'll think they're cool. Maybe they'll be show and tell ammo down the line.
 

This week has had emails from annoying clients every day right at the start of the day. Emails from clients that don't communicate internally so that your Point of Contact agrees to something but then never communicates that to the rest of their team, so you get questions about it for months. Clients that expect you to be at their beck and call and let them have meetings with you on 15 minutes notice. Clients that want meetings to discuss or clarify things that are clearly written in the report... not that they would know that because they never read the report, even when you told them in an email what section or what page to look at... That kind of thing.
However, I did get one bit of good news in the midst of this!

Huzzah!
We have made it to quality control! Grades soon! Maybe! - Probably!
I saw that it went to quality control on Tuesday, early in the morning, so I'm hoping that maybe tomorrow if I'm very lucky or maybe next week I'll see grades. I'm thinking next week is more likely. Week after next is possible. But I'm definitely feeling confident I'll have grades and maybe coins to take pictures of by early October!
Last week on Thursday I got a pink notice that USPS tried to deliver a package / envelope (LIES!!!) and so I was able to get out and collect it yesterday. As suspected it was my shipment of coins from a dealer in Hungary.
The coins are 2014 issues from New Caledonia. I'm going to make this easy on me (be lazy) and use the seller's images to show the coins for the most part.






I saw these online and thought they were very cool with the stylized, abstract turtle designs.
What the above images don't do a great job of showing is that the 2F and 5F coins are a golden-colored brass material that I've seen a fair bit of lately where the 10f, 20f, and 50f are silver-colored and probably made of zinc or nickel or plated steel. I'm not sure which yet.
The other thing I wasn't prepared for was the range in sizes involved - the 100f is actually quite massive, as is the 50f.
I'm not sure my picture below is doing a much better job of expressing the color difference (the 100f is an orange brass colored ring around a "silver" core, btw), but it should give you a feel for the range in the sizes.
I put the 2f coin at about 18 mm - same size range as a US dime - and the 100f coin around 38 mm - putting it in the same size bracket as a Morgan dollar, somewhat smaller than a lot of modern 1 oz silver bullion coins (~40-41 mm).

 
 

So.... This is long delayed, but I've been far busier at work than usual and we're having a lot of difficulties with Sam's health the last couple of weeks and months and so the journaling and the coin research is suffering.
Sam has been in decline since June. We think he has Slit Ventricle System (SVS) and he's dealing with almost daily debilitating headaches that are making him cranky and, in some cases, frankly, violent. Which just makes things hard. We're probably going to have to cancel a family vacation in October to have him hospitalized for weeks and in the meantime, we're stuck with pain management strategies that don't seem to be doing much good. That too, may tank any plans of actually making some of this work for this year, but, if it does, it does.
I also have a bad habit of making the perfect the enemy of the good enough and I've been letting that get in the way of just getting some pictures of these turtle coins I'm starting to work on imaged. But yesterday I just decided to make something happen and say, "good enough."
So, a quick update on the submission with about 35 coins I sent in:
7/5 - Shipped
7/10 - Delivered
7/27 - Showed as Received
8/3 - Payment Acknowledged
8/7 - Scheduled for Grading
The estimated times on this when I sent it in and when they acknowledged it suggest the submission will be finished around Mid-September to Early October. I'm mostly hoping that they just get home before November 1st so I can rush out some photos for the Argentine sets I'm planning, and the Venezuelan Set and the 500 Lire set I want to have more or less "finished."
The submission includes examples of the coins in the pictures that follow. These coins are ones that lost out to the ones I submitted so these are still home in flips while the ones we thought were the best are hopefully going to come back with some nice grades:
Colombia - 1000 Pesos

Cabo Verde - 1 Escudo. Sorry! These didn't come out good.

Tokelau - 1 Cent  - check out those die cracks on Queen Elizabeth's face! That die was tired!

Cayman Islands -

Congo - 1 Franc

1 Seniti 

I'm working on buying some more raw coins with stylized turtles on them. You'll almost never see me admit to shopping for something here until I've already bought it so I'm not talking yet.  
I tried showing these to Ben and he acted kind of interested and said they were cool but he was over it pretty fast. I don't think this moves the needle for him much. Maybe one day he'll think they're cool. Maybe they'll be show and tell ammo down the line.
 

A number of months ago, when surprised, I just said, "Well, that happened," and Ben latched onto it and started using the phrase. Sometimes he would look to me when something happened and say, "Was that a thing that happened?" "Yup."
We live in Houston as most of you who read this know and apparently, from my coworkers, news of our misery the week of President's day has been a topic even in the UK and Europe.
Our water was in and out from Monday to about Thursday the 18th - but even when we got it back we were under a boil water notice until about the 22nd or 23rd (hard to remember now). We lost power around midnight on Tuesday the 16th. It was out for 22 hours. We got it back for 4 hours, lost it again, and didn't have it again. We brought the boys into our bed for warmth (and a miserable night for us) and bundled up under 4 or 5 layers to stay warm.

Our ceiling caved in around 5 PM Tuesday. A pipe burst in two places. Shandy rushed in to try to poke holes and drain the water and was rewarded with sheetrock and insulation falling on her head.
Shortly before all that happened we'd been camping out in the back end of our fully gassed-up mini-van just to be in a warm place for a while - but we were smart enough to no do this with the car in the garage.
The pipe that burst was uninsulated copper pipe. With no insulation, no heat, and water cutting in and out I'm just not sure what we could have done to stop this.
One of the worst things about all of this is that we had a 9000 Watt generator and a 1500 Watt heater that could have kept us with heat in 1 room and some lights - we could have been a lot more comfortable, but we didn't buy enough gas to keep the generator running very long because we were not expecting it to be this bad. The warnings they gave before the storm were about lines coming down for a while - not power plants failing and day long blackouts. I'm not going to make that mistake again. Over the weekend we bought 4 more 5 gallon gas tanks and the next time this comes we're going to have enough gas to run the heaters, the refrigerator, the and the freezer (all that food ruined...) for 2-3 days straight. I've taken my lumps and I'm going to be better equipped next time.


Shandy was crying... I came in, looked at this, and just laughed. Shandy didn't appreciate that much but it was just too ridiculous at that point.
We left the house early Wednesday to go somewhere warmer and dryer.
The landlady got a plumber out on Thursday of last week and I returned to supervise and to dry things out and clean up as best I could since we had power back at that point.
A clean-up company then came out on Saturday to rip out the ceiling and start working on drying out the ceiling / attic. There's still a massive hole in the roof but we've been back in the House since Saturday. We still have the biggest hole in the ceiling I think I've ever seen and the room is unusable as a result with plastic sheeting everywhere but we're doing better than many / most.
We've been working on our renter's insurance claim and had adjusters out. Nothing tooo terrible lost and we can replace all of it - mostly baby books and baby toys.
In slightly better news, we're working on wrapping up our taxes and things are looking good there. Some of that money is probably going to have to be used to offset the insurance deductible but I'm still hopeful I can talk my wife into letting me get away with something small, yellow, and shiny in a plastic housing. It might be a good time to do it with the dive Gold is taking this week.
No news on performance evals, raises or bonuses this year - I'm honestly not optimistic on that front for facilitating a shiny purchase but stranger things have happened and I'm mostly just grateful to continue to have a job after the 2020 many others had.
Barring a timely gold purchase the next "coin & currency" buy is going to be a currency / pseudo currency buy.
Speaking of Ben - he is increasingly showing interest in collections and collecting things, but the things he wants to collect are 1) Beyblades, 2) Bakugan and 3) [now] pokemon cards apparently. 

So, I recently have been seeing some chatter on Facebook and elsewhere that CAC, no longer content to just deface PCGS and NGC slabs with oval stickers, is now going to be grading coins completely on their own, and putting them in slabs that look shockingly similar to PCGS slabs... I wonder how PCGS feels about that. 
Then I come on here the other day and see the 7/24 announcement that NGC is taking away the points bonus for CAC stickered coins effective the next day. As I look on the boards, there's some chatter about NGC not being able to use the verification service anymore and its starting to look like someone - possibly someone in CAC - decided that the friendly relationship that has existed that allowed for PCGS and NGC to check the CAC stickers and award these points in a highly efficient and automated way may be over because it may not serve someone's perceived interests anymore.  Yeah.... it's conspiratorial of me, and supposedly the functionality is coming back... but it has been down for about 1.5-2.0 months apparently, which seems interesting and suspicious, including with the timing. 
But, for me, this change to point values has some interesting personal side effects.
Some of you may remember that about 3 years ago the 1932 set I built with my stepfather lost the top spot in the category after being on top for more than a decade:

I made a post about it at the time and otherwise mostly shrugged it off - we weren't going to spend $$$$ to defend the title on such short notice.
My stepfather, at the time, was not thrilled as you might imagine, and I got a call not long after asking - somewhat bitterly - why PCGS coins were getting more points than NGC coins in the NGC registry. It didn't make sense to him. I had to explain that it wasn't the fact that they were PCGS coins - it was the fact that they were CAC coins. I could understand his confusion though - in addition to being almost fully CAC stickered, the other set was almost completely PCGS coins where ours was almost fully NGC graded. But it was the bonus for the CAC stickers that was putting him over the top of us.
Note - they have 5 PCGS and 1 NGC to our 1 PCGS and 5 NGC coins. But they have 5 CAC stickers to our 0 and the stickers are all on the PCGS coins.


I had actually looked into the pricing for submitting coins to CAC in the past couple of years and tried talking to my step-father because I knew getting some of our coins stickered and getting the points boost could have put us back on top, probably for just a couple hundred dollars - a lot less than trying to upgrade one of the $1,000-$4,000 coins in that set to something even more expensive. I'd been thinking if we went the upgrade route the best option was probably going to be the $10 Eagle just because bumping that from a 63 to a 64 or 65 would be easier and probably cheaper than trying to track down MS64 or MS65 D and S quarters. But, based on current pricing, upgrading the S quarter to a 64 might have been an attractive and reasonable option.
But... as of yesterday... all of those bonus points are now gone! (For now?) So, Liberty just took about a 700-point hit, and that has flipped the balance of the points back in our favor.

So, if you want a funny... We made our set back around 2008, and we have not upgraded anything in close to 15 years now, I think, and we won for about 12 years (2008-2019).
Liberty then made their set in October 2020 - a month before the cut-off - and has not changed any of their coins out in the last 3 years, and they've won for the last 3 years. For the last 3 years we've still gotten the "best set" award based on only NGC coins because... their set barely has any NGC coins.
And now we're back on top in #1 and we may take the awards again in about 3 months - both awards possibly, NGC and overall.
In that time - we'll say 3 years, since October 2020 - nothing has changed. I guess technically my last re-imaging and presentation update might have happened in that period - I can't remember the timing on that - but neither set has been upgraded. The only thing that has changed is how points are assigned.
I'll be interested to see if this prompts some kind of response or some upgrades from Liberty to try to take the top spot back.
I haven't talked to my Stepfather about this, but I guess I'll have to give him a call soon and let him know, just for a laugh.

So.... This is long delayed, but I've been far busier at work than usual and we're having a lot of difficulties with Sam's health the last couple of weeks and months and so the journaling and the coin research is suffering.
Sam has been in decline since June. We think he has Slit Ventricle System (SVS) and he's dealing with almost daily debilitating headaches that are making him cranky and, in some cases, frankly, violent. Which just makes things hard. We're probably going to have to cancel a family vacation in October to have him hospitalized for weeks and in the meantime, we're stuck with pain management strategies that don't seem to be doing much good. That too, may tank any plans of actually making some of this work for this year, but, if it does, it does.
I also have a bad habit of making the perfect the enemy of the good enough and I've been letting that get in the way of just getting some pictures of these turtle coins I'm starting to work on imaged. But yesterday I just decided to make something happen and say, "good enough."
So, a quick update on the submission with about 35 coins I sent in:
7/5 - Shipped
7/10 - Delivered
7/27 - Showed as Received
8/3 - Payment Acknowledged
8/7 - Scheduled for Grading
The estimated times on this when I sent it in and when they acknowledged it suggest the submission will be finished around Mid-September to Early October. I'm mostly hoping that they just get home before November 1st so I can rush out some photos for the Argentine sets I'm planning, and the Venezuelan Set and the 500 Lire set I want to have more or less "finished."
The submission includes examples of the coins in the pictures that follow. These coins are ones that lost out to the ones I submitted so these are still home in flips while the ones we thought were the best are hopefully going to come back with some nice grades:
Colombia - 1000 Pesos

Cabo Verde - 1 Escudo. Sorry! These didn't come out good.

Tokelau - 1 Cent  - check out those die cracks on Queen Elizabeth's face! That die was tired!

Cayman Islands -

Congo - 1 Franc

1 Seniti 

I'm working on buying some more raw coins with stylized turtles on them. You'll almost never see me admit to shopping for something here until I've already bought it so I'm not talking yet.  
I tried showing these to Ben and he acted kind of interested and said they were cool but he was over it pretty fast. I don't think this moves the needle for him much. Maybe one day he'll think they're cool. Maybe they'll be show and tell ammo down the line.
 

So.... This is long delayed, but I've been far busier at work than usual and we're having a lot of difficulties with Sam's health the last couple of weeks and months and so the journaling and the coin research is suffering.
Sam has been in decline since June. We think he has Slit Ventricle System (SVS) and he's dealing with almost daily debilitating headaches that are making him cranky and, in some cases, frankly, violent. Which just makes things hard. We're probably going to have to cancel a family vacation in October to have him hospitalized for weeks and in the meantime, we're stuck with pain management strategies that don't seem to be doing much good. That too, may tank any plans of actually making some of this work for this year, but, if it does, it does.
I also have a bad habit of making the perfect the enemy of the good enough and I've been letting that get in the way of just getting some pictures of these turtle coins I'm starting to work on imaged. But yesterday I just decided to make something happen and say, "good enough."
So, a quick update on the submission with about 35 coins I sent in:
7/5 - Shipped
7/10 - Delivered
7/27 - Showed as Received
8/3 - Payment Acknowledged
8/7 - Scheduled for Grading
The estimated times on this when I sent it in and when they acknowledged it suggest the submission will be finished around Mid-September to Early October. I'm mostly hoping that they just get home before November 1st so I can rush out some photos for the Argentine sets I'm planning, and the Venezuelan Set and the 500 Lire set I want to have more or less "finished."
The submission includes examples of the coins in the pictures that follow. These coins are ones that lost out to the ones I submitted so these are still home in flips while the ones we thought were the best are hopefully going to come back with some nice grades:
Colombia - 1000 Pesos

Cabo Verde - 1 Escudo. Sorry! These didn't come out good.

Tokelau - 1 Cent  - check out those die cracks on Queen Elizabeth's face! That die was tired!

Cayman Islands -

Congo - 1 Franc

1 Seniti 

I'm working on buying some more raw coins with stylized turtles on them. You'll almost never see me admit to shopping for something here until I've already bought it so I'm not talking yet.  
I tried showing these to Ben and he acted kind of interested and said they were cool but he was over it pretty fast. I don't think this moves the needle for him much. Maybe one day he'll think they're cool. Maybe they'll be show and tell ammo down the line.
 

So, I recently have been seeing some chatter on Facebook and elsewhere that CAC, no longer content to just deface PCGS and NGC slabs with oval stickers, is now going to be grading coins completely on their own, and putting them in slabs that look shockingly similar to PCGS slabs... I wonder how PCGS feels about that. 
Then I come on here the other day and see the 7/24 announcement that NGC is taking away the points bonus for CAC stickered coins effective the next day. As I look on the boards, there's some chatter about NGC not being able to use the verification service anymore and its starting to look like someone - possibly someone in CAC - decided that the friendly relationship that has existed that allowed for PCGS and NGC to check the CAC stickers and award these points in a highly efficient and automated way may be over because it may not serve someone's perceived interests anymore.  Yeah.... it's conspiratorial of me, and supposedly the functionality is coming back... but it has been down for about 1.5-2.0 months apparently, which seems interesting and suspicious, including with the timing. 
But, for me, this change to point values has some interesting personal side effects.
Some of you may remember that about 3 years ago the 1932 set I built with my stepfather lost the top spot in the category after being on top for more than a decade:

I made a post about it at the time and otherwise mostly shrugged it off - we weren't going to spend $$$$ to defend the title on such short notice.
My stepfather, at the time, was not thrilled as you might imagine, and I got a call not long after asking - somewhat bitterly - why PCGS coins were getting more points than NGC coins in the NGC registry. It didn't make sense to him. I had to explain that it wasn't the fact that they were PCGS coins - it was the fact that they were CAC coins. I could understand his confusion though - in addition to being almost fully CAC stickered, the other set was almost completely PCGS coins where ours was almost fully NGC graded. But it was the bonus for the CAC stickers that was putting him over the top of us.
Note - they have 5 PCGS and 1 NGC to our 1 PCGS and 5 NGC coins. But they have 5 CAC stickers to our 0 and the stickers are all on the PCGS coins.


I had actually looked into the pricing for submitting coins to CAC in the past couple of years and tried talking to my step-father because I knew getting some of our coins stickered and getting the points boost could have put us back on top, probably for just a couple hundred dollars - a lot less than trying to upgrade one of the $1,000-$4,000 coins in that set to something even more expensive. I'd been thinking if we went the upgrade route the best option was probably going to be the $10 Eagle just because bumping that from a 63 to a 64 or 65 would be easier and probably cheaper than trying to track down MS64 or MS65 D and S quarters. But, based on current pricing, upgrading the S quarter to a 64 might have been an attractive and reasonable option.
But... as of yesterday... all of those bonus points are now gone! (For now?) So, Liberty just took about a 700-point hit, and that has flipped the balance of the points back in our favor.

So, if you want a funny... We made our set back around 2008, and we have not upgraded anything in close to 15 years now, I think, and we won for about 12 years (2008-2019).
Liberty then made their set in October 2020 - a month before the cut-off - and has not changed any of their coins out in the last 3 years, and they've won for the last 3 years. For the last 3 years we've still gotten the "best set" award based on only NGC coins because... their set barely has any NGC coins.
And now we're back on top in #1 and we may take the awards again in about 3 months - both awards possibly, NGC and overall.
In that time - we'll say 3 years, since October 2020 - nothing has changed. I guess technically my last re-imaging and presentation update might have happened in that period - I can't remember the timing on that - but neither set has been upgraded. The only thing that has changed is how points are assigned.
I'll be interested to see if this prompts some kind of response or some upgrades from Liberty to try to take the top spot back.
I haven't talked to my Stepfather about this, but I guess I'll have to give him a call soon and let him know, just for a laugh.

So, I recently have been seeing some chatter on Facebook and elsewhere that CAC, no longer content to just deface PCGS and NGC slabs with oval stickers, is now going to be grading coins completely on their own, and putting them in slabs that look shockingly similar to PCGS slabs... I wonder how PCGS feels about that. 
Then I come on here the other day and see the 7/24 announcement that NGC is taking away the points bonus for CAC stickered coins effective the next day. As I look on the boards, there's some chatter about NGC not being able to use the verification service anymore and its starting to look like someone - possibly someone in CAC - decided that the friendly relationship that has existed that allowed for PCGS and NGC to check the CAC stickers and award these points in a highly efficient and automated way may be over because it may not serve someone's perceived interests anymore.  Yeah.... it's conspiratorial of me, and supposedly the functionality is coming back... but it has been down for about 1.5-2.0 months apparently, which seems interesting and suspicious, including with the timing. 
But, for me, this change to point values has some interesting personal side effects.
Some of you may remember that about 3 years ago the 1932 set I built with my stepfather lost the top spot in the category after being on top for more than a decade:

I made a post about it at the time and otherwise mostly shrugged it off - we weren't going to spend $$$$ to defend the title on such short notice.
My stepfather, at the time, was not thrilled as you might imagine, and I got a call not long after asking - somewhat bitterly - why PCGS coins were getting more points than NGC coins in the NGC registry. It didn't make sense to him. I had to explain that it wasn't the fact that they were PCGS coins - it was the fact that they were CAC coins. I could understand his confusion though - in addition to being almost fully CAC stickered, the other set was almost completely PCGS coins where ours was almost fully NGC graded. But it was the bonus for the CAC stickers that was putting him over the top of us.
Note - they have 5 PCGS and 1 NGC to our 1 PCGS and 5 NGC coins. But they have 5 CAC stickers to our 0 and the stickers are all on the PCGS coins.


I had actually looked into the pricing for submitting coins to CAC in the past couple of years and tried talking to my step-father because I knew getting some of our coins stickered and getting the points boost could have put us back on top, probably for just a couple hundred dollars - a lot less than trying to upgrade one of the $1,000-$4,000 coins in that set to something even more expensive. I'd been thinking if we went the upgrade route the best option was probably going to be the $10 Eagle just because bumping that from a 63 to a 64 or 65 would be easier and probably cheaper than trying to track down MS64 or MS65 D and S quarters. But, based on current pricing, upgrading the S quarter to a 64 might have been an attractive and reasonable option.
But... as of yesterday... all of those bonus points are now gone! (For now?) So, Liberty just took about a 700-point hit, and that has flipped the balance of the points back in our favor.

So, if you want a funny... We made our set back around 2008, and we have not upgraded anything in close to 15 years now, I think, and we won for about 12 years (2008-2019).
Liberty then made their set in October 2020 - a month before the cut-off - and has not changed any of their coins out in the last 3 years, and they've won for the last 3 years. For the last 3 years we've still gotten the "best set" award based on only NGC coins because... their set barely has any NGC coins.
And now we're back on top in #1 and we may take the awards again in about 3 months - both awards possibly, NGC and overall.
In that time - we'll say 3 years, since October 2020 - nothing has changed. I guess technically my last re-imaging and presentation update might have happened in that period - I can't remember the timing on that - but neither set has been upgraded. The only thing that has changed is how points are assigned.
I'll be interested to see if this prompts some kind of response or some upgrades from Liberty to try to take the top spot back.
I haven't talked to my Stepfather about this, but I guess I'll have to give him a call soon and let him know, just for a laugh.

I did manage this last week to print the label and mail off that large, mixed submission to NGC for grading. I decided just to use Priority Mail and let the carrier pick it up from my front door - hopefully they don't give me cause to regret that, but it seems unlikely.
In the interim things have gotten a little more interesting and there's slightly more riding on that submission now.
I noticed a week or so ago that a new set had knocked my Venezuelan type set down to #2 in the category. That person didn't have a complete set at the time and they were barely ahead of me but now they've brought their set up to 100% complete. 
There are 6 holes that I need to fill in that set. All 6 will be filled by this submission I've just sent in. But, looking at the point spread, I need to pull mostly MS66s and MS67s on the new coins to pass the new guy up again - some MS68s or another MS69 would be welcome.
If they're out there I might also consider buying a couple pre-graded coins if they'd help bump me up just a little - I have some spending money set aside and I am willing to maybe deploy a little of that to retain the top spot for that set this year. Unless all the grades on those coins come back horrible and low it's going to be a tight race with a narrow gap between us once I add those new coins in.
Though there will definitely be a limit on how far I'm going to be willing to go on it. I'm not going to continue buying up more of these same coins and submitting them in hopes of high grades when I find a really good one, for example. Part of the problem there is, I've built this set, I've had my fun building it, and I know I'll have more fun in the long-term building and researching something new than fighting over this category. But I will try to defend the title on a category - especially for a set I put so much time into and which won a major award. And on that note, no matter who takes #1 this year, I'm pretty sure my set still wins on presentation.  This reminds me of something Mike said a few years ago now about the Zimbabwe set and my thoughts at the time about it possibly being unseated.
The Zimbabwe set and it the 500 Lire set I'm building for my wife (and about to bring to 100%, I think, with this submission), remain effectively unchallenged. I guess we'll see if that changes. I DID go ahead and include a new $10 coin for the Zimbabwe set in this new submission. I don't think the new coin is going to get a great grade, but I do think it would be very nice if it could take some low MS grade (even an MS61) and bump out the current AU58 in the set. That and that $25 coin remain some of the few really weak points in that set. But finding nice examples of those coins has proven oddly difficult - and I've tried. I'm also not thinking the grades on the 1995, 2000, 2001 500 Lire coins will be great either, but there weren't many of those made in the first place, and they're a pain in the butt to get, so I'll consider it a win just to fill in those gaps for now.
We'll see how it all comes out. World Modern turnaround times are still sitting at about 9 weeks so I may not know grades on those coins until Mid-September.
I've been busy at work lately, which is good in some ways - paid work is job security. But I'm going to have to try to start shifting some focus and time soon into building out the structure of the Argentinian Sets I want to build. I'm not terribly concerned about the 500L coins or the Venezuelan coins in the submission. Those will be easy for me to build out and incorporate into the structure I've already built for those sets.
The turtle coins are probably just going to sit for now. I think that thematic set is going to have to reach a certain critical mass in terms of coin count before it makes sets to build something out in the registry for it.

I did manage this last week to print the label and mail off that large, mixed submission to NGC for grading. I decided just to use Priority Mail and let the carrier pick it up from my front door - hopefully they don't give me cause to regret that, but it seems unlikely.
In the interim things have gotten a little more interesting and there's slightly more riding on that submission now.
I noticed a week or so ago that a new set had knocked my Venezuelan type set down to #2 in the category. That person didn't have a complete set at the time and they were barely ahead of me but now they've brought their set up to 100% complete. 
There are 6 holes that I need to fill in that set. All 6 will be filled by this submission I've just sent in. But, looking at the point spread, I need to pull mostly MS66s and MS67s on the new coins to pass the new guy up again - some MS68s or another MS69 would be welcome.
If they're out there I might also consider buying a couple pre-graded coins if they'd help bump me up just a little - I have some spending money set aside and I am willing to maybe deploy a little of that to retain the top spot for that set this year. Unless all the grades on those coins come back horrible and low it's going to be a tight race with a narrow gap between us once I add those new coins in.
Though there will definitely be a limit on how far I'm going to be willing to go on it. I'm not going to continue buying up more of these same coins and submitting them in hopes of high grades when I find a really good one, for example. Part of the problem there is, I've built this set, I've had my fun building it, and I know I'll have more fun in the long-term building and researching something new than fighting over this category. But I will try to defend the title on a category - especially for a set I put so much time into and which won a major award. And on that note, no matter who takes #1 this year, I'm pretty sure my set still wins on presentation.  This reminds me of something Mike said a few years ago now about the Zimbabwe set and my thoughts at the time about it possibly being unseated.
The Zimbabwe set and it the 500 Lire set I'm building for my wife (and about to bring to 100%, I think, with this submission), remain effectively unchallenged. I guess we'll see if that changes. I DID go ahead and include a new $10 coin for the Zimbabwe set in this new submission. I don't think the new coin is going to get a great grade, but I do think it would be very nice if it could take some low MS grade (even an MS61) and bump out the current AU58 in the set. That and that $25 coin remain some of the few really weak points in that set. But finding nice examples of those coins has proven oddly difficult - and I've tried. I'm also not thinking the grades on the 1995, 2000, 2001 500 Lire coins will be great either, but there weren't many of those made in the first place, and they're a pain in the butt to get, so I'll consider it a win just to fill in those gaps for now.
We'll see how it all comes out. World Modern turnaround times are still sitting at about 9 weeks so I may not know grades on those coins until Mid-September.
I've been busy at work lately, which is good in some ways - paid work is job security. But I'm going to have to try to start shifting some focus and time soon into building out the structure of the Argentinian Sets I want to build. I'm not terribly concerned about the 500L coins or the Venezuelan coins in the submission. Those will be easy for me to build out and incorporate into the structure I've already built for those sets.
The turtle coins are probably just going to sit for now. I think that thematic set is going to have to reach a certain critical mass in terms of coin count before it makes sets to build something out in the registry for it.

I did manage this last week to print the label and mail off that large, mixed submission to NGC for grading. I decided just to use Priority Mail and let the carrier pick it up from my front door - hopefully they don't give me cause to regret that, but it seems unlikely.
In the interim things have gotten a little more interesting and there's slightly more riding on that submission now.
I noticed a week or so ago that a new set had knocked my Venezuelan type set down to #2 in the category. That person didn't have a complete set at the time and they were barely ahead of me but now they've brought their set up to 100% complete. 
There are 6 holes that I need to fill in that set. All 6 will be filled by this submission I've just sent in. But, looking at the point spread, I need to pull mostly MS66s and MS67s on the new coins to pass the new guy up again - some MS68s or another MS69 would be welcome.
If they're out there I might also consider buying a couple pre-graded coins if they'd help bump me up just a little - I have some spending money set aside and I am willing to maybe deploy a little of that to retain the top spot for that set this year. Unless all the grades on those coins come back horrible and low it's going to be a tight race with a narrow gap between us once I add those new coins in.
Though there will definitely be a limit on how far I'm going to be willing to go on it. I'm not going to continue buying up more of these same coins and submitting them in hopes of high grades when I find a really good one, for example. Part of the problem there is, I've built this set, I've had my fun building it, and I know I'll have more fun in the long-term building and researching something new than fighting over this category. But I will try to defend the title on a category - especially for a set I put so much time into and which won a major award. And on that note, no matter who takes #1 this year, I'm pretty sure my set still wins on presentation.  This reminds me of something Mike said a few years ago now about the Zimbabwe set and my thoughts at the time about it possibly being unseated.
The Zimbabwe set and it the 500 Lire set I'm building for my wife (and about to bring to 100%, I think, with this submission), remain effectively unchallenged. I guess we'll see if that changes. I DID go ahead and include a new $10 coin for the Zimbabwe set in this new submission. I don't think the new coin is going to get a great grade, but I do think it would be very nice if it could take some low MS grade (even an MS61) and bump out the current AU58 in the set. That and that $25 coin remain some of the few really weak points in that set. But finding nice examples of those coins has proven oddly difficult - and I've tried. I'm also not thinking the grades on the 1995, 2000, 2001 500 Lire coins will be great either, but there weren't many of those made in the first place, and they're a pain in the butt to get, so I'll consider it a win just to fill in those gaps for now.
We'll see how it all comes out. World Modern turnaround times are still sitting at about 9 weeks so I may not know grades on those coins until Mid-September.
I've been busy at work lately, which is good in some ways - paid work is job security. But I'm going to have to try to start shifting some focus and time soon into building out the structure of the Argentinian Sets I want to build. I'm not terribly concerned about the 500L coins or the Venezuelan coins in the submission. Those will be easy for me to build out and incorporate into the structure I've already built for those sets.
The turtle coins are probably just going to sit for now. I think that thematic set is going to have to reach a certain critical mass in terms of coin count before it makes sets to build something out in the registry for it.

When I was growing up my mother started (but failed to finish) a 2nd Master's degree. She would often make the joke that she "could have been a professional student" - meaning she loved being in classes and learning things like that - mostly about history.
Having reached my mid-30s, having earned my PhD, my 3rd and terminal degree, and gone on to hobbies that involve a lot of reading and writing, I can honestly say that I like learning - but I do not like homework, and so I don't like being a student. I'll be just fine if I never have to take another written test in my life. I'm just fine googling things and learning for free and not paying tuition. 
The older I get, the stranger I find my mother's statement.
Anyway... My membership renewed about 2 weeks ago and I have my ~35 coin submission ready to go. I just need to seal it up and put it in the mail.
I'm debating on if I really want to go through the effort to take it to the PO and send it registered or if I want to just take the risk and mail it Priority Express.
This submission is going to be quite a mix as it tries to 1) Finish the 500L set, 2) Finish the Venezuela set, 3) Build / start 2 Argentine sets, and 4) submit a bunch of turtle coins I found that are going to start what may or may not be formalized as a turtle themed custom set for Ben.
I may have some pictures to post of the turtle coins I've been picking up down the line. I just haven't found a convenient time to try to snap shots of them and what time I have had as been acquiring and selecting the last few coins and getting the submission ready to go.
 

When I was growing up my mother started (but failed to finish) a 2nd Master's degree. She would often make the joke that she "could have been a professional student" - meaning she loved being in classes and learning things like that - mostly about history.
Having reached my mid-30s, having earned my PhD, my 3rd and terminal degree, and gone on to hobbies that involve a lot of reading and writing, I can honestly say that I like learning - but I do not like homework, and so I don't like being a student. I'll be just fine if I never have to take another written test in my life. I'm just fine googling things and learning for free and not paying tuition. 
The older I get, the stranger I find my mother's statement.
Anyway... My membership renewed about 2 weeks ago and I have my ~35 coin submission ready to go. I just need to seal it up and put it in the mail.
I'm debating on if I really want to go through the effort to take it to the PO and send it registered or if I want to just take the risk and mail it Priority Express.
This submission is going to be quite a mix as it tries to 1) Finish the 500L set, 2) Finish the Venezuela set, 3) Build / start 2 Argentine sets, and 4) submit a bunch of turtle coins I found that are going to start what may or may not be formalized as a turtle themed custom set for Ben.
I may have some pictures to post of the turtle coins I've been picking up down the line. I just haven't found a convenient time to try to snap shots of them and what time I have had as been acquiring and selecting the last few coins and getting the submission ready to go.
 

When I was growing up my mother started (but failed to finish) a 2nd Master's degree. She would often make the joke that she "could have been a professional student" - meaning she loved being in classes and learning things like that - mostly about history.
Having reached my mid-30s, having earned my PhD, my 3rd and terminal degree, and gone on to hobbies that involve a lot of reading and writing, I can honestly say that I like learning - but I do not like homework, and so I don't like being a student. I'll be just fine if I never have to take another written test in my life. I'm just fine googling things and learning for free and not paying tuition. 
The older I get, the stranger I find my mother's statement.
Anyway... My membership renewed about 2 weeks ago and I have my ~35 coin submission ready to go. I just need to seal it up and put it in the mail.
I'm debating on if I really want to go through the effort to take it to the PO and send it registered or if I want to just take the risk and mail it Priority Express.
This submission is going to be quite a mix as it tries to 1) Finish the 500L set, 2) Finish the Venezuela set, 3) Build / start 2 Argentine sets, and 4) submit a bunch of turtle coins I found that are going to start what may or may not be formalized as a turtle themed custom set for Ben.
I may have some pictures to post of the turtle coins I've been picking up down the line. I just haven't found a convenient time to try to snap shots of them and what time I have had as been acquiring and selecting the last few coins and getting the submission ready to go.
 

When I was growing up my mother started (but failed to finish) a 2nd Master's degree. She would often make the joke that she "could have been a professional student" - meaning she loved being in classes and learning things like that - mostly about history.
Having reached my mid-30s, having earned my PhD, my 3rd and terminal degree, and gone on to hobbies that involve a lot of reading and writing, I can honestly say that I like learning - but I do not like homework, and so I don't like being a student. I'll be just fine if I never have to take another written test in my life. I'm just fine googling things and learning for free and not paying tuition. 
The older I get, the stranger I find my mother's statement.
Anyway... My membership renewed about 2 weeks ago and I have my ~35 coin submission ready to go. I just need to seal it up and put it in the mail.
I'm debating on if I really want to go through the effort to take it to the PO and send it registered or if I want to just take the risk and mail it Priority Express.
This submission is going to be quite a mix as it tries to 1) Finish the 500L set, 2) Finish the Venezuela set, 3) Build / start 2 Argentine sets, and 4) submit a bunch of turtle coins I found that are going to start what may or may not be formalized as a turtle themed custom set for Ben.
I may have some pictures to post of the turtle coins I've been picking up down the line. I just haven't found a convenient time to try to snap shots of them and what time I have had as been acquiring and selecting the last few coins and getting the submission ready to go.
 

Well, I wasn't planning to submit this batch of coins until my membership renewed and I got my additional $150 credit on June 12th...
The problem with this is that not having coins graded that I can pop into a set and not having a public set I can actually build has proven ... demotivating... when it comes to my research and writing efforts.
It simply isn't as fun or as satisfying to work on a Word file with no pictures.
So I've found myself pulled in other directions recently. But I'm still confident I can probably get something good together before November. Probably.
Another problem I've been grappling with however is just getting some of the coins I've ordered.
I've ordered some coins for the Venezuela set and the Italian 500 Lire set from different dealers in Europe and both sets of coins have not arrived. I've had to put in "Item not received" tickets on these, getting my money back in one instance and not in another. So, this is probably going to force me to just leave a hole in the Venezuela set for now and to just go with what I have on the 500 Lire coins.
On an unrelated note, I've been experimenting with Miniature painting recently and Ben got into it with me a little. I'll resist the urge to spam pictures on this.
Much like with the coin collecting, I find that he unsurprisingly lacks my patience. He'll declare himself done with a miniature in 30-45 minutes but I'll work on one thing for more than one session, applying more than one coat of paint, and spend a couple of hours total on each mini.
But it's fun to work on these and like me he likes using the same magnifying lamp that's been seeing use as we pick coins for grading.




I still need to find / buy / pick out some additional coins to grade when that submission goes in just to round it out. Given that we're in mid-May I should probably get on that... probably.
Or I may just end up submitting what I have or just throwing some more random stuff in.

So I'm probably going to come off like a bit of a "super judger" (as my wife puts it) while also preaching to the choir a bit, but I wanted to post about the work I've been doing on my Half Cent set recently.
I said recently that my wife gave me a 1955 Rhodesian Half Cent, following up on the 1957 and 1958 she'd given me at Christmas, buying things I'd put on my watch list. 
Putting this coin in my set put it in the #1 spot in the category. And so, it was a #1 ranked set for me - with none of my own photos, just NGC photos, no set banner image, no set description and no coin descriptions.
This happened in large part because I hadn't been focusing on this - I'd been focusing on buying and working on coins for another set that I'm also researching at the moment and I'm going to build it out as a phase 3 to what I've done with Zimbabwe and Venezuela. But then this new set snuck up on me, going from 20% complete and rank 5 to 80% complete and rank 1, driven completely by my wife, who knew I liked them and had heard me talking about them.
But once it was #1, I really felt a need to table some of the other stuff for a while, get pictures of these, and build out a presentation for the set. Because - I really think, if you made a #1 ranked set, you should make it worth looking at and fun to look at if you're at all able too - no shade intended at those that can't get a good photo of a coin, perhaps just because they don't have the equipment. But it is just so much nicer to click on a #1 ranked, 100% complete set and see gorgeous, lustrous, detailed, close-up photos. And I love that NGC made it easy to pop-in their verification photos... but that's photos are just not as good as what many of us can produce and they often do not do a good job of showing off the coin. Those photos are produced in a quick, generic, assembly line kind of way and you're not going to get the best images of a particular coin unless you're taking your time with each coin - something NGC just can't afford to do unless you're paying them an extra fee for their high-end photos.
And so, that's what I've done and built and at this point the set presentation is more or less finished and built. I have at least 1 more coin description to get to, as I'm about to get to.
Getting the 1955 meant I only had one more coin - the 1956 - left to get to complete the set. So getting that coin moved up my priority list in a big way after the 14th of last month.
As I started looking into building a presentation for the set, one of the things I like to look at and reference is the mintage for each year.
And that brought something to my attention - the 1956, the only coin I hadn't acquired, the only coin I hadn't even really seen for sale, is also the lowest mintage year with only 480,000 made that year. The next lowest had 720,000 made - 50% more - and all the other years were in the 1-2.5 million range. 
And, coincidentally, as I was looking at all of this and figuring all this out, a seller I've bought several of these Rhodesian coins from listed a 1956 in MS65RB. For reference, there are no coins at MS66 or above presently, there's a single MS65RD graded by NGC and only about 3 MS65RBs. So, this was one of the better NGC-graded examples.
So I immediately wanted that coin, and I have some hobby money saved up and I was ready to bid aggressively to get it, since it was an auction. Because, I'm not sure how long I might have to wait to see another one this good - maybe not long, maybe quite a while.
Turns out I didn't need to worry - no one else bid and no one fought me for it. But the set is now complete. 
I won the coin last weekend, and it arrived on Wednesday. I took some time last night to get pictures taken and edited to go with the pictures I took of the others last week. And so, here it is. I just need to get that last description finished.

And so the next post will probably focus on what I've been working on now that this is done.

I thought I'd post an update on the recent journal on the 20 Bolivar coin.
I did ultimately decide to buy an MS65 1930 10 Bolivar coin to go with it and I got the coins imaged a while ago when I had them both in hand.
The nice thing about these two is that they slot into that Reform coinage type set that ends at 2005, along with my pre-BsF Venezuelan coins. So I didn't have to make separate sets for one or both of these like I have for so many other small European gold coins I've collected. Adding these also moved me from 25th place, briefly to 9th, before going down to 10th. So not quite as low there anymroe.
'

A feature of these that I find quite interesting is that they do not say 10 Bolivars or 20 Bolivars. They give the weight of the coin and the purity of the gold. This goes nicely in line with the theme and my thinking on this unofficial type set I've been building - these coins come from a time, barely a century ago, when gold was the one true currency of the world, and all other currencies where just different ways of expressing weights of gold / agw.
I've been told that an Argentinian type set that I asked for will be created soon, and I've been slowly working on building out a submission to send it that will hopefully lead to the first competitive sets in 2 Argentinian categories - one made for my request. And these two sets are going to form the two parts of my new project "Brought forth with pain," which are going to focus on the Argentinian battles with debt that have taken them through 8-9 defaults (depending on who you ask/what source you use) and about 5-6 currencies since about 1807. My collection and my project is going to focus on the last 2 of these currencies - the ones relevant to my lifespan and which are the easiest to collect - the Austral (1985-1991), Peso Convertible (1992-Date).
My rough plan for now is for the Austral set to discuss the three older periods of debt crisis / currency crisis, and for the Peso Convertible set to deal with just the more recent troubles including the debt crisis that started around 2001, which has continued with related ups and downs for the last 20 years.
Like with "Gradually, then Suddenly," there's a quote here that's going to be the theme of the set essentially -
“Debts are like children – begot with pleasure but brought forth with pain.” - Moliere
Argentina has, at least with what I've seen so far, generally been a country with a lot of resources and a lot going for it, but they'll get into debt in good times - begot in pleasure - and then the debt becomes supportable in bad times - when a war starts or when global commodity prices tank, or both.
It's also interesting to me that, while Argentina is a former Spanish colony, it is actually their interactions with the UK and the United States, as the holders of the global reserve currencies, and the banks in those countries, that have bedeviled the country the most.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I think it'll be an interesting story to read more about and find a way to write about and structure a narrative around the coins.
While there is absolutely not a 1:1 correlation, you can see how historically a debt crisis lead to an inflationary crisis that lead to the death of the currency and a new national currency. The Real survived the default in 1827. The Peso Moneda Nacional survived the defaults in 1890, 1951, and 1956. But you see the default in 1982 followed by a new currency in 1983 and 1985 and the default in 1989 helped crash the Austral, leading to the Peso Convertible, which, after 20 years of trouble, seems to be enterign a bit of a death spiral.
List of Defaults:
·       1827
·       1890
·       1951
·       1956
·       1982
·       1989
·       2001
·       2014
·       2019-23
List of Currencies:
·       Real (1813-1881)
·       Peso Moneda Nacional (1881-1969)
·       Peso Argentino (1983-1985)
·       Austral (1985-1991)
·       Peso Convertible (1992-Date)
 
I guess I need to stop using Venezuela going forward and make a new category for posts about Argentina. 

I thought I'd post an update on the recent journal on the 20 Bolivar coin.
I did ultimately decide to buy an MS65 1930 10 Bolivar coin to go with it and I got the coins imaged a while ago when I had them both in hand.
The nice thing about these two is that they slot into that Reform coinage type set that ends at 2005, along with my pre-BsF Venezuelan coins. So I didn't have to make separate sets for one or both of these like I have for so many other small European gold coins I've collected. Adding these also moved me from 25th place, briefly to 9th, before going down to 10th. So not quite as low there anymroe.
'

A feature of these that I find quite interesting is that they do not say 10 Bolivars or 20 Bolivars. They give the weight of the coin and the purity of the gold. This goes nicely in line with the theme and my thinking on this unofficial type set I've been building - these coins come from a time, barely a century ago, when gold was the one true currency of the world, and all other currencies where just different ways of expressing weights of gold / agw.
I've been told that an Argentinian type set that I asked for will be created soon, and I've been slowly working on building out a submission to send it that will hopefully lead to the first competitive sets in 2 Argentinian categories - one made for my request. And these two sets are going to form the two parts of my new project "Brought forth with pain," which are going to focus on the Argentinian battles with debt that have taken them through 8-9 defaults (depending on who you ask/what source you use) and about 5-6 currencies since about 1807. My collection and my project is going to focus on the last 2 of these currencies - the ones relevant to my lifespan and which are the easiest to collect - the Austral (1985-1991), Peso Convertible (1992-Date).
My rough plan for now is for the Austral set to discuss the three older periods of debt crisis / currency crisis, and for the Peso Convertible set to deal with just the more recent troubles including the debt crisis that started around 2001, which has continued with related ups and downs for the last 20 years.
Like with "Gradually, then Suddenly," there's a quote here that's going to be the theme of the set essentially -
“Debts are like children – begot with pleasure but brought forth with pain.” - Moliere
Argentina has, at least with what I've seen so far, generally been a country with a lot of resources and a lot going for it, but they'll get into debt in good times - begot in pleasure - and then the debt becomes supportable in bad times - when a war starts or when global commodity prices tank, or both.
It's also interesting to me that, while Argentina is a former Spanish colony, it is actually their interactions with the UK and the United States, as the holders of the global reserve currencies, and the banks in those countries, that have bedeviled the country the most.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I think it'll be an interesting story to read more about and find a way to write about and structure a narrative around the coins.
While there is absolutely not a 1:1 correlation, you can see how historically a debt crisis lead to an inflationary crisis that lead to the death of the currency and a new national currency. The Real survived the default in 1827. The Peso Moneda Nacional survived the defaults in 1890, 1951, and 1956. But you see the default in 1982 followed by a new currency in 1983 and 1985 and the default in 1989 helped crash the Austral, leading to the Peso Convertible, which, after 20 years of trouble, seems to be enterign a bit of a death spiral.
List of Defaults:
·       1827
·       1890
·       1951
·       1956
·       1982
·       1989
·       2001
·       2014
·       2019-23
List of Currencies:
·       Real (1813-1881)
·       Peso Moneda Nacional (1881-1969)
·       Peso Argentino (1983-1985)
·       Austral (1985-1991)
·       Peso Convertible (1992-Date)
 
I guess I need to stop using Venezuela going forward and make a new category for posts about Argentina. 

I thought I'd post an update on the recent journal on the 20 Bolivar coin.
I did ultimately decide to buy an MS65 1930 10 Bolivar coin to go with it and I got the coins imaged a while ago when I had them both in hand.
The nice thing about these two is that they slot into that Reform coinage type set that ends at 2005, along with my pre-BsF Venezuelan coins. So I didn't have to make separate sets for one or both of these like I have for so many other small European gold coins I've collected. Adding these also moved me from 25th place, briefly to 9th, before going down to 10th. So not quite as low there anymroe.
'

A feature of these that I find quite interesting is that they do not say 10 Bolivars or 20 Bolivars. They give the weight of the coin and the purity of the gold. This goes nicely in line with the theme and my thinking on this unofficial type set I've been building - these coins come from a time, barely a century ago, when gold was the one true currency of the world, and all other currencies where just different ways of expressing weights of gold / agw.
I've been told that an Argentinian type set that I asked for will be created soon, and I've been slowly working on building out a submission to send it that will hopefully lead to the first competitive sets in 2 Argentinian categories - one made for my request. And these two sets are going to form the two parts of my new project "Brought forth with pain," which are going to focus on the Argentinian battles with debt that have taken them through 8-9 defaults (depending on who you ask/what source you use) and about 5-6 currencies since about 1807. My collection and my project is going to focus on the last 2 of these currencies - the ones relevant to my lifespan and which are the easiest to collect - the Austral (1985-1991), Peso Convertible (1992-Date).
My rough plan for now is for the Austral set to discuss the three older periods of debt crisis / currency crisis, and for the Peso Convertible set to deal with just the more recent troubles including the debt crisis that started around 2001, which has continued with related ups and downs for the last 20 years.
Like with "Gradually, then Suddenly," there's a quote here that's going to be the theme of the set essentially -
“Debts are like children – begot with pleasure but brought forth with pain.” - Moliere
Argentina has, at least with what I've seen so far, generally been a country with a lot of resources and a lot going for it, but they'll get into debt in good times - begot in pleasure - and then the debt becomes supportable in bad times - when a war starts or when global commodity prices tank, or both.
It's also interesting to me that, while Argentina is a former Spanish colony, it is actually their interactions with the UK and the United States, as the holders of the global reserve currencies, and the banks in those countries, that have bedeviled the country the most.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I think it'll be an interesting story to read more about and find a way to write about and structure a narrative around the coins.
While there is absolutely not a 1:1 correlation, you can see how historically a debt crisis lead to an inflationary crisis that lead to the death of the currency and a new national currency. The Real survived the default in 1827. The Peso Moneda Nacional survived the defaults in 1890, 1951, and 1956. But you see the default in 1982 followed by a new currency in 1983 and 1985 and the default in 1989 helped crash the Austral, leading to the Peso Convertible, which, after 20 years of trouble, seems to be enterign a bit of a death spiral.
List of Defaults:
·       1827
·       1890
·       1951
·       1956
·       1982
·       1989
·       2001
·       2014
·       2019-23
List of Currencies:
·       Real (1813-1881)
·       Peso Moneda Nacional (1881-1969)
·       Peso Argentino (1983-1985)
·       Austral (1985-1991)
·       Peso Convertible (1992-Date)
 
I guess I need to stop using Venezuela going forward and make a new category for posts about Argentina. 

So I'm probably going to come off like a bit of a "super judger" (as my wife puts it) while also preaching to the choir a bit, but I wanted to post about the work I've been doing on my Half Cent set recently.
I said recently that my wife gave me a 1955 Rhodesian Half Cent, following up on the 1957 and 1958 she'd given me at Christmas, buying things I'd put on my watch list. 
Putting this coin in my set put it in the #1 spot in the category. And so, it was a #1 ranked set for me - with none of my own photos, just NGC photos, no set banner image, no set description and no coin descriptions.
This happened in large part because I hadn't been focusing on this - I'd been focusing on buying and working on coins for another set that I'm also researching at the moment and I'm going to build it out as a phase 3 to what I've done with Zimbabwe and Venezuela. But then this new set snuck up on me, going from 20% complete and rank 5 to 80% complete and rank 1, driven completely by my wife, who knew I liked them and had heard me talking about them.
But once it was #1, I really felt a need to table some of the other stuff for a while, get pictures of these, and build out a presentation for the set. Because - I really think, if you made a #1 ranked set, you should make it worth looking at and fun to look at if you're at all able too - no shade intended at those that can't get a good photo of a coin, perhaps just because they don't have the equipment. But it is just so much nicer to click on a #1 ranked, 100% complete set and see gorgeous, lustrous, detailed, close-up photos. And I love that NGC made it easy to pop-in their verification photos... but that's photos are just not as good as what many of us can produce and they often do not do a good job of showing off the coin. Those photos are produced in a quick, generic, assembly line kind of way and you're not going to get the best images of a particular coin unless you're taking your time with each coin - something NGC just can't afford to do unless you're paying them an extra fee for their high-end photos.
And so, that's what I've done and built and at this point the set presentation is more or less finished and built. I have at least 1 more coin description to get to, as I'm about to get to.
Getting the 1955 meant I only had one more coin - the 1956 - left to get to complete the set. So getting that coin moved up my priority list in a big way after the 14th of last month.
As I started looking into building a presentation for the set, one of the things I like to look at and reference is the mintage for each year.
And that brought something to my attention - the 1956, the only coin I hadn't acquired, the only coin I hadn't even really seen for sale, is also the lowest mintage year with only 480,000 made that year. The next lowest had 720,000 made - 50% more - and all the other years were in the 1-2.5 million range. 
And, coincidentally, as I was looking at all of this and figuring all this out, a seller I've bought several of these Rhodesian coins from listed a 1956 in MS65RB. For reference, there are no coins at MS66 or above presently, there's a single MS65RD graded by NGC and only about 3 MS65RBs. So, this was one of the better NGC-graded examples.
So I immediately wanted that coin, and I have some hobby money saved up and I was ready to bid aggressively to get it, since it was an auction. Because, I'm not sure how long I might have to wait to see another one this good - maybe not long, maybe quite a while.
Turns out I didn't need to worry - no one else bid and no one fought me for it. But the set is now complete. 
I won the coin last weekend, and it arrived on Wednesday. I took some time last night to get pictures taken and edited to go with the pictures I took of the others last week. And so, here it is. I just need to get that last description finished.

And so the next post will probably focus on what I've been working on now that this is done.

So I'm probably going to come off like a bit of a "super judger" (as my wife puts it) while also preaching to the choir a bit, but I wanted to post about the work I've been doing on my Half Cent set recently.
I said recently that my wife gave me a 1955 Rhodesian Half Cent, following up on the 1957 and 1958 she'd given me at Christmas, buying things I'd put on my watch list. 
Putting this coin in my set put it in the #1 spot in the category. And so, it was a #1 ranked set for me - with none of my own photos, just NGC photos, no set banner image, no set description and no coin descriptions.
This happened in large part because I hadn't been focusing on this - I'd been focusing on buying and working on coins for another set that I'm also researching at the moment and I'm going to build it out as a phase 3 to what I've done with Zimbabwe and Venezuela. But then this new set snuck up on me, going from 20% complete and rank 5 to 80% complete and rank 1, driven completely by my wife, who knew I liked them and had heard me talking about them.
But once it was #1, I really felt a need to table some of the other stuff for a while, get pictures of these, and build out a presentation for the set. Because - I really think, if you made a #1 ranked set, you should make it worth looking at and fun to look at if you're at all able too - no shade intended at those that can't get a good photo of a coin, perhaps just because they don't have the equipment. But it is just so much nicer to click on a #1 ranked, 100% complete set and see gorgeous, lustrous, detailed, close-up photos. And I love that NGC made it easy to pop-in their verification photos... but that's photos are just not as good as what many of us can produce and they often do not do a good job of showing off the coin. Those photos are produced in a quick, generic, assembly line kind of way and you're not going to get the best images of a particular coin unless you're taking your time with each coin - something NGC just can't afford to do unless you're paying them an extra fee for their high-end photos.
And so, that's what I've done and built and at this point the set presentation is more or less finished and built. I have at least 1 more coin description to get to, as I'm about to get to.
Getting the 1955 meant I only had one more coin - the 1956 - left to get to complete the set. So getting that coin moved up my priority list in a big way after the 14th of last month.
As I started looking into building a presentation for the set, one of the things I like to look at and reference is the mintage for each year.
And that brought something to my attention - the 1956, the only coin I hadn't acquired, the only coin I hadn't even really seen for sale, is also the lowest mintage year with only 480,000 made that year. The next lowest had 720,000 made - 50% more - and all the other years were in the 1-2.5 million range. 
And, coincidentally, as I was looking at all of this and figuring all this out, a seller I've bought several of these Rhodesian coins from listed a 1956 in MS65RB. For reference, there are no coins at MS66 or above presently, there's a single MS65RD graded by NGC and only about 3 MS65RBs. So, this was one of the better NGC-graded examples.
So I immediately wanted that coin, and I have some hobby money saved up and I was ready to bid aggressively to get it, since it was an auction. Because, I'm not sure how long I might have to wait to see another one this good - maybe not long, maybe quite a while.
Turns out I didn't need to worry - no one else bid and no one fought me for it. But the set is now complete. 
I won the coin last weekend, and it arrived on Wednesday. I took some time last night to get pictures taken and edited to go with the pictures I took of the others last week. And so, here it is. I just need to get that last description finished.

And so the next post will probably focus on what I've been working on now that this is done.

So I'm probably going to come off like a bit of a "super judger" (as my wife puts it) while also preaching to the choir a bit, but I wanted to post about the work I've been doing on my Half Cent set recently.
I said recently that my wife gave me a 1955 Rhodesian Half Cent, following up on the 1957 and 1958 she'd given me at Christmas, buying things I'd put on my watch list. 
Putting this coin in my set put it in the #1 spot in the category. And so, it was a #1 ranked set for me - with none of my own photos, just NGC photos, no set banner image, no set description and no coin descriptions.
This happened in large part because I hadn't been focusing on this - I'd been focusing on buying and working on coins for another set that I'm also researching at the moment and I'm going to build it out as a phase 3 to what I've done with Zimbabwe and Venezuela. But then this new set snuck up on me, going from 20% complete and rank 5 to 80% complete and rank 1, driven completely by my wife, who knew I liked them and had heard me talking about them.
But once it was #1, I really felt a need to table some of the other stuff for a while, get pictures of these, and build out a presentation for the set. Because - I really think, if you made a #1 ranked set, you should make it worth looking at and fun to look at if you're at all able too - no shade intended at those that can't get a good photo of a coin, perhaps just because they don't have the equipment. But it is just so much nicer to click on a #1 ranked, 100% complete set and see gorgeous, lustrous, detailed, close-up photos. And I love that NGC made it easy to pop-in their verification photos... but that's photos are just not as good as what many of us can produce and they often do not do a good job of showing off the coin. Those photos are produced in a quick, generic, assembly line kind of way and you're not going to get the best images of a particular coin unless you're taking your time with each coin - something NGC just can't afford to do unless you're paying them an extra fee for their high-end photos.
And so, that's what I've done and built and at this point the set presentation is more or less finished and built. I have at least 1 more coin description to get to, as I'm about to get to.
Getting the 1955 meant I only had one more coin - the 1956 - left to get to complete the set. So getting that coin moved up my priority list in a big way after the 14th of last month.
As I started looking into building a presentation for the set, one of the things I like to look at and reference is the mintage for each year.
And that brought something to my attention - the 1956, the only coin I hadn't acquired, the only coin I hadn't even really seen for sale, is also the lowest mintage year with only 480,000 made that year. The next lowest had 720,000 made - 50% more - and all the other years were in the 1-2.5 million range. 
And, coincidentally, as I was looking at all of this and figuring all this out, a seller I've bought several of these Rhodesian coins from listed a 1956 in MS65RB. For reference, there are no coins at MS66 or above presently, there's a single MS65RD graded by NGC and only about 3 MS65RBs. So, this was one of the better NGC-graded examples.
So I immediately wanted that coin, and I have some hobby money saved up and I was ready to bid aggressively to get it, since it was an auction. Because, I'm not sure how long I might have to wait to see another one this good - maybe not long, maybe quite a while.
Turns out I didn't need to worry - no one else bid and no one fought me for it. But the set is now complete. 
I won the coin last weekend, and it arrived on Wednesday. I took some time last night to get pictures taken and edited to go with the pictures I took of the others last week. And so, here it is. I just need to get that last description finished.

And so the next post will probably focus on what I've been working on now that this is done.

A number of months ago, when surprised, I just said, "Well, that happened," and Ben latched onto it and started using the phrase. Sometimes he would look to me when something happened and say, "Was that a thing that happened?" "Yup."
We live in Houston as most of you who read this know and apparently, from my coworkers, news of our misery the week of President's day has been a topic even in the UK and Europe.
Our water was in and out from Monday to about Thursday the 18th - but even when we got it back we were under a boil water notice until about the 22nd or 23rd (hard to remember now). We lost power around midnight on Tuesday the 16th. It was out for 22 hours. We got it back for 4 hours, lost it again, and didn't have it again. We brought the boys into our bed for warmth (and a miserable night for us) and bundled up under 4 or 5 layers to stay warm.

Our ceiling caved in around 5 PM Tuesday. A pipe burst in two places. Shandy rushed in to try to poke holes and drain the water and was rewarded with sheetrock and insulation falling on her head.
Shortly before all that happened we'd been camping out in the back end of our fully gassed-up mini-van just to be in a warm place for a while - but we were smart enough to no do this with the car in the garage.
The pipe that burst was uninsulated copper pipe. With no insulation, no heat, and water cutting in and out I'm just not sure what we could have done to stop this.
One of the worst things about all of this is that we had a 9000 Watt generator and a 1500 Watt heater that could have kept us with heat in 1 room and some lights - we could have been a lot more comfortable, but we didn't buy enough gas to keep the generator running very long because we were not expecting it to be this bad. The warnings they gave before the storm were about lines coming down for a while - not power plants failing and day long blackouts. I'm not going to make that mistake again. Over the weekend we bought 4 more 5 gallon gas tanks and the next time this comes we're going to have enough gas to run the heaters, the refrigerator, the and the freezer (all that food ruined...) for 2-3 days straight. I've taken my lumps and I'm going to be better equipped next time.


Shandy was crying... I came in, looked at this, and just laughed. Shandy didn't appreciate that much but it was just too ridiculous at that point.
We left the house early Wednesday to go somewhere warmer and dryer.
The landlady got a plumber out on Thursday of last week and I returned to supervise and to dry things out and clean up as best I could since we had power back at that point.
A clean-up company then came out on Saturday to rip out the ceiling and start working on drying out the ceiling / attic. There's still a massive hole in the roof but we've been back in the House since Saturday. We still have the biggest hole in the ceiling I think I've ever seen and the room is unusable as a result with plastic sheeting everywhere but we're doing better than many / most.
We've been working on our renter's insurance claim and had adjusters out. Nothing tooo terrible lost and we can replace all of it - mostly baby books and baby toys.
In slightly better news, we're working on wrapping up our taxes and things are looking good there. Some of that money is probably going to have to be used to offset the insurance deductible but I'm still hopeful I can talk my wife into letting me get away with something small, yellow, and shiny in a plastic housing. It might be a good time to do it with the dive Gold is taking this week.
No news on performance evals, raises or bonuses this year - I'm honestly not optimistic on that front for facilitating a shiny purchase but stranger things have happened and I'm mostly just grateful to continue to have a job after the 2020 many others had.
Barring a timely gold purchase the next "coin & currency" buy is going to be a currency / pseudo currency buy.
Speaking of Ben - he is increasingly showing interest in collections and collecting things, but the things he wants to collect are 1) Beyblades, 2) Bakugan and 3) [now] pokemon cards apparently. 

A number of months ago, when surprised, I just said, "Well, that happened," and Ben latched onto it and started using the phrase. Sometimes he would look to me when something happened and say, "Was that a thing that happened?" "Yup."
We live in Houston as most of you who read this know and apparently, from my coworkers, news of our misery the week of President's day has been a topic even in the UK and Europe.
Our water was in and out from Monday to about Thursday the 18th - but even when we got it back we were under a boil water notice until about the 22nd or 23rd (hard to remember now). We lost power around midnight on Tuesday the 16th. It was out for 22 hours. We got it back for 4 hours, lost it again, and didn't have it again. We brought the boys into our bed for warmth (and a miserable night for us) and bundled up under 4 or 5 layers to stay warm.

Our ceiling caved in around 5 PM Tuesday. A pipe burst in two places. Shandy rushed in to try to poke holes and drain the water and was rewarded with sheetrock and insulation falling on her head.
Shortly before all that happened we'd been camping out in the back end of our fully gassed-up mini-van just to be in a warm place for a while - but we were smart enough to no do this with the car in the garage.
The pipe that burst was uninsulated copper pipe. With no insulation, no heat, and water cutting in and out I'm just not sure what we could have done to stop this.
One of the worst things about all of this is that we had a 9000 Watt generator and a 1500 Watt heater that could have kept us with heat in 1 room and some lights - we could have been a lot more comfortable, but we didn't buy enough gas to keep the generator running very long because we were not expecting it to be this bad. The warnings they gave before the storm were about lines coming down for a while - not power plants failing and day long blackouts. I'm not going to make that mistake again. Over the weekend we bought 4 more 5 gallon gas tanks and the next time this comes we're going to have enough gas to run the heaters, the refrigerator, the and the freezer (all that food ruined...) for 2-3 days straight. I've taken my lumps and I'm going to be better equipped next time.


Shandy was crying... I came in, looked at this, and just laughed. Shandy didn't appreciate that much but it was just too ridiculous at that point.
We left the house early Wednesday to go somewhere warmer and dryer.
The landlady got a plumber out on Thursday of last week and I returned to supervise and to dry things out and clean up as best I could since we had power back at that point.
A clean-up company then came out on Saturday to rip out the ceiling and start working on drying out the ceiling / attic. There's still a massive hole in the roof but we've been back in the House since Saturday. We still have the biggest hole in the ceiling I think I've ever seen and the room is unusable as a result with plastic sheeting everywhere but we're doing better than many / most.
We've been working on our renter's insurance claim and had adjusters out. Nothing tooo terrible lost and we can replace all of it - mostly baby books and baby toys.
In slightly better news, we're working on wrapping up our taxes and things are looking good there. Some of that money is probably going to have to be used to offset the insurance deductible but I'm still hopeful I can talk my wife into letting me get away with something small, yellow, and shiny in a plastic housing. It might be a good time to do it with the dive Gold is taking this week.
No news on performance evals, raises or bonuses this year - I'm honestly not optimistic on that front for facilitating a shiny purchase but stranger things have happened and I'm mostly just grateful to continue to have a job after the 2020 many others had.
Barring a timely gold purchase the next "coin & currency" buy is going to be a currency / pseudo currency buy.
Speaking of Ben - he is increasingly showing interest in collections and collecting things, but the things he wants to collect are 1) Beyblades, 2) Bakugan and 3) [now] pokemon cards apparently.