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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

Testing the capacity of an NGC Label and completing the move.

I've been talking and thinking about starting a set of the Innovation Dollars to show the boys as they get older and a seller on eBay gave me an offer for this after I watched it so I decided to bite. After shipping it cost me $20. At that price it just becomes fun impulse buy at a stressful time. I thought it was worth it to begin the journey of about 50 coins with this one. I think I will make a set of these, but in the near term I think my focus will be adding a few more presidents to that ol
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Revenant in Family

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Coin Photography

Test of Concept With the Ring Light:

I got a little time today where Shandy had both the kids occupied and I decided to get that ring light out and go for it to get some proof of concept shots. I decided to snap some quick shots of something I’ve taken pictures of recently so I can compare the shots I get this way to some recently taken shots done the way I’ve been doing them lately (camera on the floor with an LED on a speedlight). So, I grabbed my 1880 10G. Old photos taken the old way: New Photos taken with the R
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Revenant in Coin Photography

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Family

Taking my shiny right out of my hands, but getting away with it for being cute.

Following up on my last post, just  for fun. I'd left the 2018 American Innovation coin on my dresser. I picked it up and was going to take it to join the other coins. Sam was in the room and it caught his eye and he demanded that I hand it over. He proceeded to walk around with it, wave it around and look at it. I think this is one of those times when you just have to say "what the heck," and let them have it. Worst case scenario is he manages to break something I couldn't break
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Revenant in Family

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Surviving the worst week...

The worst week in 4 years of college... Well my friends, this week has been truely painful. I've been working on a term paper in Process Safety Systems and projects in Process Dynamics and Plant Economics. I had a test on Friday that I didn't have time to study for (care to guess what that grade will look like?) and I have another one on Monday. Tuesday is an oral exam and my last lab report is due. Everyone in all my classes agrees, this is the worst week in 4 years. It's so strange that th
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Family

Survived that weekend...

Well, we got the negative Covid test from my Nephew late Friday, but by then my wife and Sam were already at the ER because Sam gave us the scare of our lives when he stopped talking and we were worried he might be having seizures or some other issue and might have shunt failure. Two nights at the hospital later, short on a lot of sleep, we came back home on Sunday after a day of observation saying, "we'll watch for now, move up some of his other tests and appointments and see if we see any more
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Revenant in Family

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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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Submission Tracking Fixation

Stop spreading it! Sheesh... Everytime I read about someone else obsessively checking their submission status both in the journals and on the chat boards it makes me want to check the status of mine. As of today both invoices in my submission are showing as "Received." They just got them today. It's generally not my practice to check the status of my submissions but once or twice a day, usually at the end of the work day. I have not yet contracted the subject specific case of OCD that some col
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Subjective Novelty

It’s a little funny sometimes to come to a place like this and see someone talking about a 225 coin or token and to hear or see them say, “it’s not all that rare or special, but I like it,” and to contrast that with the reaction I get sometimes from my family. You show people a 225-year-old token and they’re going to think it’s crazy cool! - Or maybe not… As others have noted recently, sometimes you show someone something that you think is really cool - and they just shrug and say, “that’s
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Subdivided Registry

Getting 1 registry account to represent 2 different (separate?) groups of coins. When I originally joined the registry I was joining just for my own fun and to list my own coins. I started with 1 set, my eagles. My registry grew to contain 17 sets. Only 3 of which are anywhere near finished but almost all of them are sets I hope to one day complete. I'm getting off track though because I don't want to get caught up in that subject. The point is that this was my collection. Several weeks ago
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Still alive

In case anyone still remembers... Found myself thinking of this place again recently. I defended my PhD a little under a month ago and passed by unanimous vote of my committee. I've been working on getting all my paperwork turned in and getting all of my approvals but everything should be go for graduating in August 2015 and becoming Dr. Pittman. Today marks 1 year since I met a wonderful young lady who I see myself staying with. It'll be one year since our first date in about a week. In t
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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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Family

Starting work on PawPaw's coins

Some of the 2x2s I ordered came in today and Ben wanted to play with them not really understanding what they were so I agreed to work with him with them when Sam was napping. We sat down with the bag of coins from PawPaw and the staplers and tried to put some in the 2x2s. He lost interest quickly. He still struggles with the stapler. He's young. He doesn't get it fully. I'm easily more interested in these than he is, but maybe that'll change with time. He's four. I still need to remember th
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Revenant in Family

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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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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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Spring Break is coming!

And this terrible week is getting close to being over. Well guys, I took my "Kinetics and Reactor Design" mid-term this morning... all I can say is "Yuck." Maybe everyone else failed and it won't be so bad... At this point I just have to study all day tomorrow survive my test in "Mass Transfer Operations." It's times like this when I get awfully tempted to buy a coin or two that I want just to feel better about the beating that my GPA is about to take... Friday is payday though... so you never
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Italian Coins

Sometimes you wonder if they're watching... but they're probably not! lol

So I made my post a few weeks ago about picking up that 1981 200 Lire and I talked about wanting to get a 1980 because of the design of that coin and how fitting I thought it was for a tribute set to my wife. At the time I was hitting up eBay to see if I could find any of the 1981 graded by NGC - most likely from this same seller because this seller seems to be about the only one offering modern Italian issues graded by NGC. But I didn't find any. So that had me looking for raw e
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Revenant in Italian Coins

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Sometimes you hate the game and especially the player…

I’m always amazed by the games some people try to play in conducting business, even the ones that, at least on paper, you shouldn’t need to worry about because they have 100% positive feedback with scores in the thousands… Find an auction for something you like, check it out, see it has free shipping with nary a word anywhere about shipping insurance or anything else. You bid, win the item and, within minutes, the seller sends an invoice for it. Now, if you’re like me and you pay throu
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Sometimes the unlikely happens - Sam is home

Things went well and fell into place yesterday and Sam was released this morning. He's finally home from the NICU after 59 days (16 days before his due date). 2-12-2019 to 4-12-2019 - Finally home from the hospital. Now the fun really starts. I may not be getting to play with coins and the camera this weekend... USPS was supposed to deliver a package yesterday for the Zimbabwe set. Apparently, even though the package has been in Houston since Wednesday, they're being a bunch a ins
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Sometimes It's just not in the cards...

If it's not one thing it's another. I find the time and the energy to try and image some new coins, and, after setting up my camera, I find that the rechargable battery is dead, and I don't have any other batteries, and I can't find the charger... That really just doesn't seem particularly fair. I really need to find that battery charger... Everyone has hopefully had great holidays. December was a wild ride over here as some of you are already partially aware. December 10th was the registry
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Something I love about the people here.

Some praises need to be sung for the people that hang out here. A few weeks (maybe months at this point) Sheik Sheck offered to send me something for Sam and I got this a short time later: This is a ZImbabwean P-9, 100 ZWD note. It's one of the few first dollar notes I didn't have a PMG graded example of. It also happens to be the series 2 note that has an image of elephants in the lower corner that is mirrored on the front and back of the note (elephants being the theme we chose
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Gold

Someone's bitter pill - the things that shouldn't have been graded.

I have a saved search still on eBay for "ngc Netherlands 10G," so I get notified when one pops up without having to search myself all the time. I continue to hope an 1885 or 1886 will pop up one day to help me complete that set. But... 90% of the time I get an email and it's an 1875... or an 1877. I just got an email for my 10G search and it's an AU55 in a new holder, and I just can't help but shake my head and think, someone was REALLY disappointed when that posted the grade results.
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Revenant in Gold

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Family

Some Updates… That escalated quickly... very quickly.

Sam’s intensive therapy is over. Yay! His last day was actually the Thursday I posted about getting the plaque in the mail. Three weeks of stress and crying and having a generally unhappy 2-year-old can end – but it was for his own good, and he did great. He’s supposed to continue to wear a cast and restrict his left hand one day a week and one meal a day to continue the development of motor skills with his right hand, but that hopefully won’t be as contentious. Shandy and I both got the fi
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Some More (Old?) Mexican Silver

Continuing to work on the Mexican Libertads and a little more... Last week one of the other members on the forums was offering a fairly large amount of silver for sale. This is something he doesn't pretty consistantly. He always seems to have a lot of silver available that he wants to unload. Sometimes he moves material, other offerings get offered again in a couple of weeks and new material periodically enters. I saw that he was offering 37 1984 silver libertads a price much lower than I'd
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Some coin fun at Renfest today.

My wife and I went to Renfest today, childfree, while her parents had our sons. While there I found a "penny" on the ground only to find that it was some weird, penny-like token with a Jolly-roger on it. I'll see if I can get pictures of it to share later. Later on in the day I was given a 1974 half dollar in change - and I couldn't even tell you the last time that happened. No one ever has half dollars these days. I didn't keep it though. I tossed it into a tip jar later in the day.
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Random Nonsense

Some additional random bits of Nonsense

Thought I’d throw some notes out about some other nonsense that probably doesn’t rate having a stand-alone post: I recently found myself wanting/ needing to get more boxes again for the first time since 2020, and I decided to do something a little different. I remembered that NGC had sold red boxes with gold lettering instead of the standard grey / silver ones with blue lettering. NGC is sold out of those but there are sellers on Amazon that have them for re-sale at reasonable-ish prices. J
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Revenant in Random Nonsense

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