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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

Raising Dust over Mexican Silver

Getting Mexican Libertads for my signature set. When I made the decision to start working towards my signature set, there was at least 1 coin that I knew was bound to be a miserable pain to acquire. That coin was, naturally, the early design of the Mexican Libertad series. It was redesigned around 1996. For a nice example of the new design all you have to do is buy some of the most recent year at close to melt. The old design is a slightly bigger problem. A really nice, good looking example of
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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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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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Coin collecting by the numbers...

The craziest logic for selecting a coin/series ever! Well, I was looking for a nice coin to pick up to celebrate the end of the year and I got to thinking... I'm working on my 1st degree (my B.S.), I just finished my 8th semester and based on the grades I was expecting I thought I'd have a cumulative GPA of 3.75... and from this, I decided it would be cool to get a gold coin from 1875. Yeah... I'm sure that's perfectly resonable logic, right? Well, I went looking but quickly ran into a probl
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Fun Weekend

Spending time at a non-coin convention I've spent most of this weekend at a local gaming/anime convention that is held at my university every year. Before I started college, lost most of my free time and found coin collecting I was a gamer. This is great fun to me even if I don't get to indulge in it often. Ours is the largest and oldest student run convention in the country. This was the 40th year. Those of us that know what it is are quite proud of it. We like discussing coin auctions here
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This is the last of Earth!

I am content. - John Quincey Adams, Last Words As crazy as things get around here dealing with school and work it's easy to complain about life. This week though I'm pulling up on a bit of a milestone. In 6 days I'll be 22 years old. Because of issues I'm not going to get into, I was lucky to make it to my first birthday, lucky to make it out of high school alive (long story), and sometimes you just have to wonder how you made it through 2 decades. Last year, upon reaching 21, I purchased a pa
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I Just Don't Really Like "Colorized" Coins.

The more I think about this the more sure I become of it. There seems to be an ever-increasing number of colored or painted coins coming out of certain countries the last few years. At first I thought they were potentially neat but the more I've thought about it the more I've grown to dislike the basic concept. One of the things that always made me love coins (especially silver ones) is that they are metal and they are SHINY. Plastics and other materials will never hold the same sense of str
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Random Nonsense

A Random Thought on the Awards Announcement...

So, two weeks later I find myself looking at the text of the awards announcement again - in part because I've also been swapping emails with NGC/PMG about mailing addresses and in part because I just really like what they said about my note set - and I notice the video they have and decide to watch it. So... a bit of context but... 2 weeks ago I was tasked at work with recording demo / how-to videos on how to use our software. These are supposed to go on YouTube as a Marketing tool (to sho
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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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A Nice Surprise The Day After Christmas

Half a troy pound of silver and some plastic As I was approaching graduation day earlier in this month, another collector's society member was nice enough to offer me an MS69 kookaburra for my collection as a graduation present and even offered me my choice from the years he had available. He had several MS69s left over after upgrading his set to MS70s. I decided to take things one step further and offered to buy the others from him. It would allow him to get rid of some extras and allow me to
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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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Pointflation and why it happens...

It's not much of a mystery IMO really. It seems like every couple of months I see a post that discusses how a person has lost rank when their point total didn't go down (or even when it went up). There seems to be a general frustration among members that the number of points required to obtain a given rank keeps going up. The simplest (and seemingly most common) explanation for this seems to be that the users directly below them are adding more coins and passing them in rank. This is likely tr
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Trapped in the incomplete

Nothing can get finished... Lately I'm feeling kinda trapped by my collecting projects. I have started large sets that I want to build and while they're great for long-term goals, it doesn't give much gratification to fill one more hole in a sea of holes in a set. I'm currently pursuing the following: Lincoln Cents [MS66-68RD](250+ coins) Statehood Quarters [MS67-68] (~180 coins) Presidential Business Strikes [MS65-66FD] (80 coins, 8 more years) Presidential Proofs [MS69UC] (40 coins,
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Conditionally Back...

It's been a while. I managed to make myself seriously busy the last few months. I obtained the B.S. in Chemical Engineering but I won't be starting work on a Ph.D until the Fall. I decided that I needed something to keep me occupied and I almost did the job too well. I've gotten to continue my part-time job for the University (at a 7% raise since I'm no longer a student) and just for fun I decided to take art classes at the local community college just for fun. It looks like I'll be able to
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Invest or Save....

I'm not sure what to do. Well friends, I live the life of a poor college student. I live most of the year in a small dorm. My parents pay for my tuition, phone and car insurance. I work a part time job to pay for my food, medicine and most anything else I want while I'm up here. What's left after I pay for the necessities becomes my coin budget (coin collecting crowds pretty much everything else out of the discretionary budget). 1 other thing does manage to complete with the coins though. I
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Glad that week's over...

1 test down... Okay... So I said I wouldn't buy anything this week and I didn't. Whoop! I bid on something, but it doesn't end until Saturday evening so that doesn't count. Yes, the fact that I didn't acquire anything for 2 weeks doesn't really seem like a bit accomplishment (big display of self-control right?). Well, when what you want is cheap enough to be an "impulse buy," and you're trying to resist that impulse, that gets rough. Those coins can call with greater force than the sirens ca
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Another kudos to NGC?

What about the other person? One thing I think we tend to forget in thanking the NGC staff for handling our transfers and conflicts so quickly is the person who has the coin registered already. Yes the staff at NGC do act very quickly to get the transfers made and we should thank them, but before they can do anything the other person claiming the coin gets an e-mail to respond. In an ideal situation this person responds quickly which enables NGC to act quickly to get the coin moved. If the p
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I'm still here

Keeping on. Mostly window shopping... I've been keeping busy with class and work. I also haven't had much to report on. I've been making a smaller number of bigger purchases lately. Individually, they aren't going to be all that fun to talk about or hear about. There's a chance that I'll have some bragging rights by December but we'll see. Thursday I was in the final part of a 250 mile round trip when my car got hit by road debris off a truck. Bye, bye ball joints. Hello repair bill and gett
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Results on the 6 coin submission are in

Wow! That turned out great! Overall I'd say this submission went extremely well. The results were actually better than I had dared to hope for. Invoice: 2755950 001 2006 SILVER NEWZEALAND NORTH ISLAND BROWN KIWI $1 MS69 002 2005 SILVER NEWZEALAND KIWI $1 MS70 003 2004 SILVER NEWZEALAND SPOTTED KIWI $1 MS70 004 2006 CHINA PANDA S10Y MS70 005 2008MO MEXICO S1ONZA MS65 006 2008MO MEXICO S1ONZA MS69 I can't even say how great the grades on the kiwis were. The 2004 and 200
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A Type of Peace

Coming to terms with the Peace dollar? I?ve read the posts by more than one person on more than one occasion talking about how much they love the peace dollar. When asked, my step-father (fellow collector) will tell you that he prefers the Peace dollar to the Morgan. Sometimes I almost feel like I?m the only one who prefers the Morgan (though, based on the number of registry sets, I can't be). There are several historical reasons why I tend to dislike the idea of the Peace dollar. I look at
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Fun new pick-up...

While I'm continuing to mull over the fate of the 1875... In the midst of trying to decide what I want to do with the PCGS-graded 1875 Netherlands 10 Guilden, I found an 1887 for sale on eBay. It's only an MS64 where I mostly like to stick with MS65 or higher but this coin doesn't come up for sale very often in any grade. Only about 40,000 were minted originally and only about 50 have been graded by NGC, and this one was graded by NGC so it works for the registry set. The icing on the cake was
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Branching Into Notes A Tiny Bit.

Picking up a few silver certificates and maybe some FRNs I've always found coin collecting more interesting and more rewarding than the idea of collecting paper currency notes, but I do have a certain fascination with the paper money, especially with respect to how the notes have changed (esp in the last 20 years) and how their meaning has changed (ie, the retirement of the silver and gold certificates and the closing of the metal exchange option, the rise of "legal tender"). I'm taking the
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Well, doesn’t that just look… odd?

I’ve been really focusing on my Zimbabwe note set recently but I’ve been having a nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me that I should try to set a part of my budget aside soon and pick up the Falcons I need for my Queen’s beast set. I think the biggest problem I’m having with listening to that little voice right now is that the Zimbabwe notes / set / collection has me feeling pumped and excited and interested right now and that Falcon just... doesn’t. If it weren’t for the fact th
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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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Conversations about coins and metal

I'm finally getting to post this... It has been a really crazy week. Every time I tried to post something happened. I've had to deal with taking the GRE (Verbal:610; Quantitative: 790; WHOOP!), getting test scores back (100 FTW!), meeting due-dates for assignments, purging computer viruses, tolerating stupid roommates, and now getting sick... stupid roommate, getting sick and giving it to me. What kind of disgusting insufficiently_thoughtful_person spits up phlegm in the same sink we brush our
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