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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

Family

Children can be adorable when it comes to presents

My wife ordered my birthday present about a week ago. She was trying to keep it quiet but then Ben saw her and wanted to "help" and gave it away in a big way. I think she ordered something for my Zimbabwe note set but I don't know for sure so this has me trying to limit / hold off on major purchases for the next couple of weeks until she gives it to me. Ben has been very funny throughout this. First he insisted that he needed to get me a small present too that he had to pick out and then he
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Venezuelan Coins and Currency

The plot thickens...

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 categor
Italian Coins

So... 6 next year?

So, the awards deadline has come and gone, and I made the joke to Shandy along the lines of, "Well, I lost the 50 Lire this year, but I managed to win in 4 Italian categories instead of 2 this year, so that's cool, right?" Her response was, "So, you're going to get me 6 next year, right?" "You planning to up my budget? " More seriously, my quip back to her would be that I'll feel pretty good about it if I manage the defend the title on 2 or 3 of these 4 next year. I seem to be decently good at c
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Revenant in Italian Coins

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Venezuelan Coins and Currency

But those die cracks...

I took a little time to try to get a few shots of one of these Venezuelan coin that I think is showing die cracks / die wear issues and see what everyone thinks, both using the Nikon with the Micro lens and the new Coin Microscope. Looking at this (50 Bolivar) in person, and looking at it in the photo with the macro lens and this lighting, that line along the back of the neck definitely looks raised above the design and not cut into it and so I'm thinking more and more that this is a die cr
Family

It comes to a head: The 2nd revision

To borrow phrasing from my wife, Somethings have been odd with Samuel for a while. After getting a fast MRI (which had been delayed by him getting sick the day before the scan) the doctor wasn’t convinced by those results but was concerned by our observations of his behavior and wanted a CT. After getting a CT this morning, they told us to turn back around and come to the ER. We suspect a clog / slow failure – all four ventricle spaces have enlarged; some have nearly doubled. But they’re just go
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Gold

The new Challenger has stepped up... and I think he's serious!

A few months ago I posted about a new set appearing in the Netherlands 10G set that had a coveted MS64 example of the 1879/7. This left me with a lot of questions and now they've just given me a lot more information and a lot to think about. The member has added 5 more coins to the set, including all the rarer dates, including the 1885 and the 1886 I've long looked for... and they all have the same invoice number... numbered -001 to -005. They almost certainly submitted these themselve
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Venezuelan Coins and Currency

Modern Venezuelan (Hyperinflation) Coins

When I started down this road and started planning this entry in my head, I didn’t think I’d be posting this coming off a win with the Zimbabwe coin set, but... The thing you generally don't see with a hyperinflation collection is coins. Which is probably why it surprised and excited me so much when I realized that, with the release of the digital bolivar and the 3rd Venezuelan redenomination, they were releasing a 1 Bolivar coin with the 5 new banknotes. Then, when I went lookin
Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

I’m going to have to rethink this… find a better way… Or Maybe Just MORE…

I found a seller offering some old, Franklin Mint, “Coin Sets of the World” cards for Zimbabwe that had the coins from 1C to $1. Some of them were made in the 1990s and some of them had less-appealing coins with some spotting, but they had a couple – at a slightly higher price, but still only about $11 for a coin set - that had only coins from 1980-1983, that were clean, pretty, and spot-free per the listing and “nearly perfect.” I saw these and decided to snap them up, initially thin
Random Nonsense

Curious, Jealous, and Annoyed

I think it's getting up to 2 years since I've added a coin / filled a hole in the 10G set and the set is still sitting at 72% with 3 slots open. But the low hanging fruit is all gone and all that's left are 3 coins that don't always show up. The last couple of years I’ve been adding other types of world gold coins to my collection and not finished this set largely just because I haven’t seen any attractive opportunities come up. Mine is one of the oldest sets in that category. It was one of
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Revenant in Random Nonsense

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Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

Not sure when or how, but the grades have posted at long last…

I was checking last night, and these still showed as being in quality control. This afternoon I opened my laptop, and the submission tracker page was open in a tab I left open last night when I shut the laptop. It auto updated / refreshed, and I saw “shipped” flash across my field of view as I was closing the tab, and then I frantically re-loaded the page, wondering if I had finally gone crazy. I’m guessing this is the result of some back-office people in the shipping department workin
Family

A little cuteness and positivity for the day...

Sam though quite recovered is serving out the last days of his quarantine because we have to go by 10 days from his positive test even though I'm pretty sure he'd been fighting it for a while at that point and he probably stopped being contagious days ago. As sometimes happens, he rediscovered some replica Morgans and Silver Eagles that another member here gave me for them, which he and his brother like to play with on occasion. At that point, for the next half hour or so at least a couple
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Revenant in Family

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Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

And now things get more clear...

So, I was still feeling salty about those $2 and $5 bi-metallics and decided to leave a bad review on them a while ago - I left good reviews on two raw notes I'd bought that both graded well. A few days later they reply to the 5-star reviews thanking me, but I see nothing on the 2-star... The 5 stars are showing on the website, but the 2 star isn't. Three days later I finally see a reply come through saying that they tried to reach out to me but got no response... the 2-star review sti
Random Nonsense

An interesting thought on the concept of "insurance."

When I shipped my box of 10G coins (and a few others) last week I was pretty happy/ content to fork over an extra $26 for Registered mail. The box in question was worth about $5,000-6,000 dollars and contained 12 years of a collecting journey. I would have a hard time finding another 1880, 1887 and 1888 in Gem or near gem grades. I do not want to lose those. However, I'm hoping to queue up 2 more submissions soon - one to NGC and one to PMG, both related to my Zimbabwe collection, that are
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Revenant in Random Nonsense

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Family

My Wife Just Used the ANA Money Museum to Tempt Me...

She loves to travel and she desperately wants to get out and take a trip somewhere and is brainstorming all of these ideas about where to go and what to do when this is over. She's looking at taking a vacation for a long weekend to Colorado. In the middle of her research she figured out that the ANA Money Museum is in Colorado and she's trying to use a day there to tempt me into getting excited and agreeing to the idea. Does she know me too well or think I sell too cheap? That is the q
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Revenant in Family

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I love him, but he just kind of breaks… everything.

Ben came into my office the other day and found the 1986 Silver Eagle I have that’s in the original mint packaging. He’s always coming into my office wanting to take things from there or from my desk. Apparently, I just have all the best… everything! And he just wants to play with and take all of it. So, he decides that he needs to take it downstairs and show it to momma. Of course, he trips on the tile in the kitchen and drops it and breaks a chip off the mint capsule for the coin… Great!
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Half way there

Well, today was my much-anticipated day off because of my 9/80 schedule. The dealer shipped out the coin very promptly and I went to bed last night knowing that it was in town and due to be delivered on a day when I could be home to wait and sign for it – very useful with the seller requires a signature for delivery. I can’t say I blame him for it but I hate making trips to the post office for packages and this new post office we have has already lost one package for me in the 2 months since we
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My new $20.95, TOP POP coin… Patience Pays Off?

Well, I just ordered what will be a companion piece to my Zimbabwe note set / the first coin in a related project – I haven’t decided yet. The coin is a 1980 Zimbabwe 10 Cent piece, graded MS65 by NGC. The coin happens to be TOP POP. I say “happens to be” because it also happens to be the only one of its kind graded by NGC – hard NOT to be top pop at that point. Anyway… MS65 is a decent, Gem BU, grade. I saw this coin come up months ago on eBay and seriously considered buying it, but I
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A coin collector's birthday

I got my big surprise that my wife and her mother have been sitting on for about a month and a half yesterday. It would seem that, while in Pennsylvania for work, her mother stopped at the Philadelphia mint, too the tour and these things. The Silver Eagle and the birthday set were for me, the coin explorer book was for Ben and the birth year set was for Sam. She also got a bag from the mint that’s also pretty cool. The book for Ben is pretty neat to look at. I hop
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Collecting while married...

That much discussed and debated 1875 came in the mail Tuesday. I over-spent my coin budget a little bit to get it with the agreement that I wouldn’t buy anything for a month or so while my budget caught up with the spending. It’s a deal I’ve made in the past and one I made again because I’ve been worried that the current run-up in the gold price could continue and that could make the coins more expensive to buy in another month or so. Even so, it was a modest over-reach of my budget, just $
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An interesting chance to learn about errors?

Ben went to the museum with my wife today and operated the penny press himself. Expert press operator that he is, apparently something went slightly wrong.  Even so, I think it's fair to say that he was happy with the results. Making pre-schoolers happy and making a collector can be quite cheap and easy - $5 for the album and $0.51 every time he gets a coin to put in it. He wants to take that album with him whenever he goes to the zoo or the museum now. Some
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Mistakes Happen – because we’re all human

We’ve had a fair bit of discussion in the boards lately on phantom sets, ghost sets, inactive sets, and sets with coins that a person no longer owns or never owned or what have you. It’s all a bit cloak and dagger for me. But the discussion did remind me of something that happened to me about 5 years ago. I got a notification from NGC that someone else had tried to register a penny that I had registered in one of my sets. I immediately started getting indignant and bent out shape b
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Success!! (With the Micka Mouse Money)

After my son’s lukewarm response to the Chuck E Cheese 40-year tokens in the aftermath of his birthday party I left the tokens sitting out on my nightstand. Ben comes into our bedroom a lot in the mornings when he first wakes up and he likes getting things off my nightstand and playing with daddy’s stuff. Today he comes into our room and sees the tokens sitting there. He takes interest, picks one up, holds it out to me and says, “Daddy, I need it” - his way of telling me I need to get it ou
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Maybe I was wrong about the pricing on the 20 Trillion note…

In fairness to a seller that I have and now continue to do business with I think I need to take back my earlier assessment that they overcharged my wife when she bought that ungraded Zimbabwean 20 Trillion Note for $60.    I guess the thing that should have been my first clue was that they’ve always offered returns and gave us a perfect, no-fuss return on the note and I’ve always been able to get very reasonable prices from them on so many other things, including most of my oth
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It's the waiting that's going to get me...

We're finally coming up on the end of the year. Starting in January the annual look back on things begins an around February we should find out about pay raises and bonuses. I'm hoping both for a decent raise and a great bonus. I joined the company about a year ago and I think I've performed beyond their expectations in a vast majority of ways, going from being a new hire to a person that's writing technical papers for the company and giving presentations at conferences and symposia. My goa
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Group Photos and re-imaging

Whenever I get a new coin for a set, provided it’s a smaller set that doesn’t require pulling out 20+ coins, it’s always fun to pull out all the coins in the set and look at them together. It can be a lot of fun with the larger sets too but it can also be a lot of work to find them all amongst the other coins, get them out and, eventually, put them all back. When I get the new coin in for such a set I try to get new pictures done and this usually leads to new pictures being taken for the wh
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