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About this journal

This journal was originally to record my thoughts on collecting and building my Netherlands Wilhelm III Gold 10 Gulden Set and other projects like  my modern silver bullion NCLT sets. When it got started in the summer of 2007 I was single, in my early 20's, and working on my B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering. Starting in 2016, with my marriage and the birth of my first son, Benjamin, much of my writing has focused on raising my sons to have a love of collecting coins and exonumia and discussing how my collecting occurs in the context of my marriage and life overall.

Entries in this journal

Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

Zimbabwean Coins Set and Traveler’s Check Sets

I said in a recent post that I’d be looking to buy some Zimbabwe coins from a dealer in the US that I’ve used a lot and get those submitted. Then, to my surprise, when I went to order, I found that they’d upped their prices and upped their minimum order from $50 to $100. Yeah, they offer free shipping, but, sheesh. Let me have the option to pay the shipping for a smaller order. I wanted to order 2 sets of coins and some notes for about $55. I had not wanted to or planned to spend $100 and buy 3-
Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

Zimbabwe Round 2 Grade Results are in!

TL:DR – The coins did great and I’m thrilled and freaking out a bit about some of these! XD So “Thank you, NGC” on the hard work and the much faster than expected turnaround.   I need to give major props to NGC, who have pulled off a major turnaround, brought turnaround times down and delivered me grades on these months sooner than I was thinking. It was only about 5-6 weeks ago that I was saying I might not have grades for another 4 months from now. I’m hoping this also means tha

You probably shouldn’t…

So over the weekend my wife met a friend for reasons we won’t go into because they’re unpleasant and my wife was there to be a friend but… Let’s just say this was someone we met back in March in the NICU… Anyway… After a while my wife sends me a message asking me if she can get away with going a little over-budget on my Christmas. I’ve been "pounding the table" so-to-speak on watching the budget. I just told her to do what she wanted but she probably shouldn’t. (Hey, I’m arguing agains
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2020 Awards

You know, it’s really kind of amazing...

I told my wife today, “You know, it’s really kind of amazing: You combine antibiotics, with steroids, NSAID pain relievers, expectorants, nasal decongestants, and antihistamines, and a few hours later you feel a lot more comfortable!” I’ve had a sinus infection kicking my butt more and more for a week and a half and I finally went to the doctor today to get help being it. Drugs! Am I right? Yeah… Now that you’re all convinced I’m a pill head… I was walking out the front door
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2020 Awards

Yesterday’s Delivery

So, unlike with the PMG plaque, which arrived on 2/27 - much to my shock – I can’t really call this one a surprise in the mail. I’d seen other’s posting about getting theirs on Monday and Tuesday, so I knew the arrival of this package was probably imminent. Still, it was great to get it. My home office and my windows sit almost directly above the front door to the house, so I heard the carrier scanning the barcodes and the beeping as it was dropped off and I wondered in that moment if that’
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Revenant in 2020 Awards

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Wrapping up 2016...

Didn't quite go how I'd hoped but it could have been a lot worse. Tragically in mid-September the downturn in the price of oil hit home and I got laid off with about a dozen other people at the company I worked with. The company had about 90 employees so in context laying off a dozen people is a pretty big deal. It wasn't the end of the world. We'd known for a while that it could happen so we'd been reducing expenses and trying to build savings and there's always unemployment while that lasts
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Wow. Amazing how far life can take you...

14 months... It's funny to me that I still think about this place periodically. Wish I could be here like I used to be. I miss you guys. Life has been choosing other priorities though. I don't have the luxury of it all anymore. Still have my coins. Still moving forward with the Ph.D. Learning so much. 2 relationships later. One was horrible; One, well, we'll see. Kinda funny to me that it was the new girlfriend that made me think of this place again. Nice that I'm so predictable with pa
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2020 Awards

Worst of the Best?

In late December / early January I picked this Zimbabwe coin up as a kind of extension or part of my Zimbabwe note set. I added it to a set in the registry and it became a #1 ranked set with 1 coin and a total score of 16 points. We're after the awards cut-off now and its still #1 and I think it's going to get a "Best in Category" this year, with a total score of 16 points. This has me wondering what the lowest scoring set to ever win a "Best in Category" is / was.  
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Revenant in 2020 Awards

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World Coin Price Guide?

Honestly, I don't know. I've thought about getting a reference and trying to price them and if I find something I like I'll let you know but right now you probably know as much as I do. Most of the foreign coins I have mean more in a sentimental sense than anything else so I've never tried to price them. Most of what I have falls into 2 categories. 1) Coins from my grandparents' trip to South America and Europe when my mother was a little girl and 2) Coins given to me from a friend of my mothe
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Woohoo! Thank you!

So, first off, thank you to NGC for the journal award! When the announcement of what would be given out this year made no mention of the journal awards, I was thinking that meant there would be no journal awards this year - and I don't think I was alone in that assumption. Participation in the journals has dropped aggressively since 2017 and, given that, it certainly could have been an understandable move. I suppose it’s possible that it was their intent to do away with it, but then we pu
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With Days Like This...

I'm glad I have a hobby. I came back to college yesterday to start the new semester. I found out that the Hall staff had taken my 50ft 12-gauge extension cord as contraband. I then had to deal with (hopefully) the only senior on this campus that doesn't know how to pronounce the word "confiscated." (I'm sorry, but no. It's not "con-fist-i-cated.") Then, today, while buying school supplies someone backs into my car and breaks the cover piece to my break light. And of course he didn't have his i
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Why our spouses usually shouldn’t buy our collectables…

Tomorrow is my 3rd Anniversary with my wife. We decided to exchange gifts yesterday because I wanted to give her an opportunity to use her gift. She’d been secretive about my present. Lately she’s been getting me mostly practical gifts but we’re practical people. As I’ve transitioned into my 30s and fatherhood, I find I have less and less desire for random stuff in my life. My coin collection is one of the few things in my life these days that falls into a special category of “it’s mostly u
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Who Says Registered Mail is Slow?

From Texas to Florida in a weekend. Wow! Whenever I talk to people about registered mail I get this speech about "it's slower than other forms of mail because it's tracked so carefully but it's much more secure." I get that, but how slow is it really? My latest submission was given over to USPS at our local post office on Friday afternoon (3/20). I checked today and apparently NGC has received it! I did a double take when I saw that. Interestingly enough, this submission was received exactly 2
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When Is it worth grading?

Are only mint state coins worth grading? Or do coins become worth grading once they reach a certain set value? Unlike many of you, I'm barely launched on this journey. I've been trying to learn as much as I could over the last year but there's one question I've been running into increasingly often. When is a coin worth grading? Obviously the modern coins are only really worth grading if a high MS grade can be obtained but what about older coins? Do they necessarily have to be MS and worth hund
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When is it something more?

The issue of emotional ownership of the set... When I first started to try and build a certified set of silver eagles about a year ago, I noticed that there were several dealers that would sell the entire series as a set. This option was actually in some cases cheaper than buying the coins 1 by 1. At the time I could have not bought any of them, saved up the cash and bought them as a set. In the final analysis, it would have saved me about $200, but I'm glad I didn't do it. It occured to me
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When I’m Wiser and I’m Older.

Looking back, I made the first entry into this journal on June 14, 2007, when I was not quite 21 years old (clocking in at 32 now, with a receding hairline. Oh, how it does sting a bit).    This was 10 years before NGC would switch to the new (current) journal format and we’d gain the ability to give a unique name to our journals. I’ve given some thought over time to what I think I’d like to call this (other than just “Revenant” or “Revenant’s Journal”) and I think I’ve settled
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What’s in the Easter Basket? Lot’s of money and lots of candy.

My wife hit upon the idea of putting coins / spare change in some of the eggs for the Easter egg hunt we set up for Benjamin late in the day on Easter Sunday. We had dinner with her parents and then did an egg hunt just for him in the back yard around 6:30 or so. Shandy came up with the idea of letting him have money in some of his eggs completely on her own. It was her idea. I had nothing to do with it – I swear! Some of the eggs hand your standard fair – jelly beans, chocolate kisses, Reese’s
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Venezuelan Coins and Currency

What's this then... Oh! I thought this was never coming!

So yesterday there's a knock at the door and I see it's the mail carrier, and he has a small package. As I'm walking up I'm wondering what this is and thinking I'm not really expecting anything. When he gives it to me it's the 2nd set of 2002-2004 Venezuela coins from Ukraine! I had completely forgotten about these things. I've been busy and I hadn't thought about them or thought to check the tracking in weeks. The last tracking update I'd seen had them in Kiev on April 6th. Then, whil
Registry

What works for the Physical Doesn't work for the Digital I guess

Well, after (finally) putting the time and the energy and cash / credit behind getting them all reholdered I had thought that a picture of the group of coins all in their matching slabs would make a good banner image for my 10G set in the new registry. While I do think the group of coins look good and I'm still happy I got them reholdered, and while I do think the images looked good, I have to admit that they fell a bit flat as banner images. I think they look great in pers
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Revenant in Registry

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What we forget and the power of the journals

A while ago I was looking back through some of my old journal entries, something which I’m sure many of the long-time journal author’s do, and I found the first entry that references my 10G set, just as it was getting started, which I made right around 10 years ago in May 2009. The thing that struck me in reading that post was how much of that information I’d forgotten in the intervening years. I remembered that the 1875 was the first coin purchased for the set. I had not remembered th
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What to do...

A bit of a windfall I found out recently that, starting next month and continuing for 9 months, I'll be getting a regent's fellowship in addition to my graduate assistantship. After taxes, it's like saying I'm going to have about $600 added onto a $1400 income. I can live on the $1400, and that basically makes the $600 gravy. I can do whatever I want with it basically. While I will save some of it to rebuild my cash reserves, I'm not going to save all of it as cash in the bank because that j
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Family

What I would be doing if I still didn’t have kids…

There are days when I really wish this was still the summer of 2006 and I could spend an entire week searching rolls of pennies looking for things to put in my Whitman folders or looking through rolls of dimes and quarters looking to see if there might be any old silver ones in there like I see other people talking about on Facebook and Reddit. There are times lately when I wish I had the chance to try to beat the personal record I set for myself when I made a 19.5 inch tall column of pennies th
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Revenant in Family

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What funny little birds...

Collecting the New Zealand Kiwi Bullion Series Well, a few people messaged me and accurately identified the bird pictured in my last post as a Kiwi. It's kind of a funny looking bird isn't it? A wingless, nocturnal, grub eating bird that lives in the brush. They're proof that there needs to be predators in this world. A few thousand years without a legitimate threat and nature creates something adorable but completely defenseless... which is a big part of why they're going extinct. Some had th
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What a week....

From Friday to Friday, oh what "fun" has been had. 1 week ago on the 15th the Postal Service finally delivered a package they had had for exactly 4 weeks. For a shipment from Austin to Houston that's just terrible, but it arrived. Both invoices in my first submission to NGC have switched to "scheduled for grading" on different days this week. I'm checking daily in vain hope. I must admit that I'm really excited by this and I'm really hoping for at least a few good grades. A childhood frien
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Well... That's a new one on me!

I didn't think that this could happen! I've been doing a fair bit of work recently to improve my signature set for 1 Oz silver bullion coins. One of the things I did was to go back and replace the images of the Australian lunar silver dollars that I had. Some of them hadn't been imaged at all. The ones that had been imaged all looked pink. It was a combination of lighting and a color balance problem. I had uploaded the images anyway because I had nothing better at the time. The new images had
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