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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

An Intriguing Imbalance

A bit of cross comparison between the NGC, PMG, and CGC registries I don't know if the rest of you have ever thought about this, but the NGC registry has 6040 ranked members (and remember that you have to have at least 1 point worth of coins in order to rank). CGC has about 1860 and PMG limps in with about 180 ranked members. Is this any indication of the relative popularity of the hobbies? Is it more likely a statement as to which groups are most likely to get their collectables encapsulate
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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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We’ll get ‘em next year…

After I graduated from undergrad a bunch of the people that I went to school with started a tailgate for graduates from our year called the “We’ll get ‘em next year” tailgate. I was a reference to the fact that our football team frankly wasn’t that great and when we’d have a bad game or a bad year we’d say, “We’ll get ‘em next year,” and we’d been saying that for several years running at this point. I’m realizing at this point that I’ve let this year slip past me and, contrary to what I sai
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The New '32.

Sleep is a splendid and wonderful thing, when you can get it. I finally got to have some rest yesterday and, rather than taking a nap in the afternoon I decided to get some pictures taken, edited and sent over to Choya with the new set and coin descriptions. He indicated his approval, so the newly updated 1932 set is up. If you've seen the set before I don't think the new version is going to have many surprises for you. Other than the updates regarding Bob to the set description it
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Registry

The Psychology of Completion

I’m narrowing in on getting to call several on-going projects complete. My 10G set is about 80% complete if you don’t count the 1879/7 variety. My Queen’s Beast sets are getting into about that same 80% range and several of the parts / sub-series of my Zimbabwe hyperinflation set are getting to be about 85-92% complete by pick number. Most of these sets are missing only 1-3 issues before they’re 100% complete registry sets. One thing I’ve been noticing lately is that, as I narrow in on the
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Gold

The 20 Lire and Soon the 20 Marks.

The 1882 20L coin arrived recently and I'm very happy to have it. It's a great addition to my growing set of smaller European gold coins from the late 19th and early 20th century - a group of coins I call my "golden nickels," because they're all about the size of a US nickel and because of what happened at around that same point in history with the "no cents" V nickels in 1883. It's a group of coins from the pre-Great War period that I think I'll always find endlessly fascinating. All
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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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Steelies Stealing My Thunder No Longer!

I apologise for how long I expect this will be... I love the lincoln cents. I hope to have a very nice set of them one of these days. I have what some have pointed out as being some rather tough grade standards for the set but that just means the set will take longer to build and be better in the end. Almost ever since I got my first certified cent and started down the path of building this set I've wanted a nice certified 1943 steel cent, only MS66s or MS67s would do and in truth it was the
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It's Panda Time!

and other news and teasers of what's to come. I find that I tend to get sidetracked rather easily. My registry is somewhat representative of this; 46 sets. I started a few projects mostly just for fun. Then I left them standing when I couldn't support every set and I moved back to one of my core projects. My Chinese Panda set has been a really acute example of this. About 10 months ago I bought the 2008 Panda and made a registry set for it. I was just starting to think about building my signat
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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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Started down the crazy road

I have started sending in submissions, and other updates I just sent in my first submission. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed but I'm not going to bother with speculation on the grades I'll get. There are 2 invoices on the submission. 1 is a 56 coin modern submission and the other is using the 5 coin freebie coupon for some older material (mostly 19th century). I say "started down the crazy road" because of all the twists and turns and ups and downs to grading, especially went it comes to
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SAE Victory

Making progress. Last Friday I picked up a 1989 Silver eagle which has been shipped but hasn't arrived yet. Well, tonight I pulled a double, winning the 1988 and 1991 in a set of dutch auctions. This was partially to advance my set and partially to reward myself after a series of test grades all came back very good.
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Fighting over Silver Leaves

Oh what funny trees they must have in Canada? I normally don?t share stories about bidding wars but the end result of this is just too funny. A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough (I felt) to purchase a nice 2007 Canadian Maple Leaf in MS68. By the standards of these Canadian coins, an MS68 is pretty darn high. MS69s are fairly rare and MS70s are almost unheard of. Grades in the MS64 to MS67 range are much more common. I was happy to get the coin. It let me add a representative piece for th
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Well, no West Point Quarters for me today...

Maybe I shouldn't post this... feels like it might be stepping on a landmine... but... I'm not that smart. So... I had to go to the bank today to deposit some cash that a relative gave me to pay for something. I figured while I was in the bank anyway I'd just see if they had any of the new quarters. I thought it might be fun to search some rolls. I figured if I found anything I'd stick them in 2x2 mylar flips and sit on them for 10+ years. When I got back into coin collecting as an adu
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Overhaul

Complete remodeling needed. I've taken the first steps towards revamping my SAE collection and getting that closer to completion, (I hope to be 100% by 1 year after the first coin was bought, about 7 months from now. I'm currently only about 50%.) Looking at my registry collection in general though, I'm convinced that I'll need to completely rework things. I need to update with all the new images and I think I'm going to redo all of my half-assed descriptions. Unfortunately this all gets t
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Family

The joys of the junk box... it goes beyond coin collecting.

I took Ben to that game store today while Shandy and the baby were napping to kill some time while we were waiting for the sellers to finally vacate the new house - it was the last day of the leaseback and they were clearly unprepared and determined to drag things out all day. We didn't get the keys until 8:30 PM after telling us 5PM and cussed me out and left the house dirty when I challenged him on it, but we won't dwell there. I don't want this to be about that. Anyway... There was a bin
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This time I totally bought the label

I know the first rule of collecting in registry-ville is “buy the coin, not the label,” but the coin I got in the mail at the end of this week was all about the label. A 2019, 1/4th oz American Gold Eagle, Early Release, Blue label, graded MS70. In 2007, I bought a MS70 1/4th oz AGE for my 21st birthday. It was my first ever gold purchase, 2 years before I started the 10G set. When Ben was born, I bought a 1/4th oz 2016 AGE in MS70 to celebrate and one day give it to hi
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Hard times; Great Victories; Getting Older

Sometimes when we feel we're getting smacked around, that just means we're doing better than we thought. It always seems a bit funny to me to see the surprises life hands us. When we feel like we're taking a beating, we usually win our greatest victories. I noted a couple of weeks ago that I had taken the GRE. I had all the scaled scores except the Analytical Writing, which I honestly didn't expect to be all that great. I hadn't had to write a timed analytical essay in quite a while and I di
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So… Why the Rooster?

Ever since I purchased my 1913 20 Franc French Rooster last year, I’ve been wondering why the French government would have made a coin that so prominently featured this bird. My curiosity was peaked further when I saw the older Winged Freedom design and saw that it also had a rooster on it, although, in that case, the rooster was much smaller and was not a dominant design feature. As it turns out, the answer is pretty easy to find online, but It’s just taken me a year to invest the effort i
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The Queen’s Beast Sets – I might actually finish these.

Over the weekend I got a package with 4 of the Yale coins. Back in December I finished picking up the rest of the Falcons that I needed. So that gives me all of the coins I need for the first 6 issues and 2/3rd of the total I need for the 7th issue – so I’m almost 70% of the way there now and I’m only about 1-ish issue behind. After thoroughly failing to keep up with the statehood quarters and the presidential dollars as they were coming out I’d like to actually be able to say that I
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Mental Snapshots in Set Development?

Changes in perceptions and attitude and the effects on our sets. Have you ever wished that you could take a set that you?ve put a lot of work into and compare what it looks like today to what it looked like a month or two ago? Wouldn?t it be nice to look at where you were and where you are and just consider what you?ve done and how you feel about it? I?ve been feeling that way lately about my signature set. I know I?ve been stuck on discussing this set for quite a while now, but as far as co
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Possibly Some Thwarted Optimism with the Queen's Beast Series.

When I found out that the UK Royal Mint was going to be releasing the Queen’s Beast series a few years ago I got really excited. My mother was always really into family genealogy and the coat of arms and family / clan patterns from Scotland and all of that fun stuff. My family originates mostly from England and Scotland and I’ve always thought the coat of arms was cool. I loved the fact that they were going to be big, thick, 2 oz, high relief rounds and I loved what the artist had done with the
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Unexpectedly Revisiting the Family Mint Sets

About 11 years ago now, during my last year as an undergraduate, I helped by step-father build a group of mint sets - one for all of our birth years. We worked together on it all summer, hunting down coins and mint sets, sifting through mint sets looking for coins that we would later submit ourselves, going to coin shows together. It was a lot of great fun and when it was all said and done we completed most of the sets. The 1958, 1982, and 1983 sets remained unfinished. We were going to try
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The 63rd Houston Money Show

Shandy took the kids to spend the day with her parents in Deer Park and that left me free to go to this show after Naked Angel put me on to it a few days ago. I debated not going and just spending the day alone at the house – quiet time alone at the house is a valuable thing. The show, while being the “Houston” Money show was also actually in Conroe and it was a 45 mile, 65 minute drive to get to it, which isn’t a trivial commute. Still, I don’t get opportunities like this a lot and I ultim
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Standing in the Doorway

Here we are. This is it. Today marks a very significant event, both here on the registry and in my personal life. The senior chemical engineering majors gave our final project presentations today to our teacher, industry representatives and any faculty that wanted to come. After that was the exit interview. We were asked about our time here, what we liked, what we thought could have been better, and would we have done it again knowing what we know now. For a surprising number of us, that ans
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