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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

"Would you like to know more?"

Borrowing the title from that line in "Starship Troopers." Anyone else remember that movie? I hear it's 25 years old now? Anyway... I feel like I teased this concept months and months ago - probably close to a year ago now - but I never really delivered on it: I feel like I very much survive on a kind of "one step at a time" incrementalism some days. I got the coins back, I got them in the set. I uploaded new descriptions a while after that. Got new pictures posted a couple
Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

Looks like the ZiG is going to zag down. Hard.

Mike recently helped bring to my attention that we're about to get our first new Zimbabwe coins in about 6 years and my Zimbabwe Coin and Note sets are going to be growing again. The new currency was announced earlier this month (I think around the 5th) and they're supposed to release the new notes tomorrow (on the 30th) and there are already some interesting signs that things are not going well: They announced 8 note denominations and 2 coin denominations (0.25 ZiG and 0.5 ZiG)
Gold

The joys of the gold market...

As I've referenced recently, I've been sitting on and trying to accumulate some cash in my hobby budget to maybe buy a 1924 $20 double eagle in MS65 - my grandmother's birth year and now a newly 100-year-old coin. My grandmother would have been 100 years old in February if she were still alive. I finally got some things moved around and have saved enough that I now have almost $2600 in my hobby budget, and the coin, back in January, was going for about $2,500-2,600. But gold has moved
Revenant

Revenant in Gold

2
Turtle Coins

Moldovan (Transnistrian?) Turtles

One of the predictable outcomes of me starting to work more seriously on a collection / set of coins with a turtle theme is that its going to have me branching out into some more things and giving me extra opportunities to digress into, "Hey! Look at this thing I just found!" I recently found a seller offering 4 of these coins from that feature a sea turtle. I ordered all 4 of the ones they had listed. When those came in and looked great, and I saw the seller had listed 3 more, I ordered th
Revenant

Revenant in Turtle Coins

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Registry

Well, that is mildly disappointing… but I have grades!

Okay, so, after several rounds of going back and forth between “Grading/Quality Control,” “Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging,” and “Quality Control/Finalized,” the submission is finally finalized and shipped, and I have grades. On a few of them, all I can say is… Woof… For Italy… While these mostly are not great I can’t call most of these disappointments. Yeah… the 1995 is lower than I’d hoped for, but the 2000 and 2001 are better than I’d worried they might be. At the end of the day
Revenant

Revenant in Registry

2
Turtle Coins

Coins with turtles

So.... This is long delayed, but I've been far busier at work than usual and we're having a lot of difficulties with Sam's health the last couple of weeks and months and so the journaling and the coin research is suffering. Sam has been in decline since June. We think he has Slit Ventricle System (SVS) and he's dealing with almost daily debilitating headaches that are making him cranky and, in some cases, frankly, violent. Which just makes things hard. We're probably going to have to cancel
Revenant

Revenant in Turtle Coins

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Random Nonsense

I like learning... not homework...

When I was growing up my mother started (but failed to finish) a 2nd Master's degree. She would often make the joke that she "could have been a professional student" - meaning she loved being in classes and learning things like that - mostly about history. Having reached my mid-30s, having earned my PhD, my 3rd and terminal degree, and gone on to hobbies that involve a lot of reading and writing, I can honestly say that I like learning - but I do not like homework, and so I don't like being
Revenant

Revenant in Random Nonsense

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Family

Progress on the new set is going a bit slow...

Well, I wasn't planning to submit this batch of coins until my membership renewed and I got my additional $150 credit on June 12th... The problem with this is that not having coins graded that I can pop into a set and not having a public set I can actually build has proven ... demotivating... when it comes to my research and writing efforts. It simply isn't as fun or as satisfying to work on a Word file with no pictures. So I've found myself pulled in other directions recently. B
Revenant

Revenant in Family

2
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
Revenant

Revenant in Italian Coins

2
Venezuelan Coins and Currency

People just make it hard to be nice...

One of my wife's favorite reasons to laugh and roll her eyes at me (other than my nerdy coin-collecting ways) is that she thinks I'm far too polite to people that come to the door trying to sell solar panels and telemarketers... It's how I was raised. I try to be nice and civil and give people soft but firm nos. I try to respect the fact that they're just trying to earn a paycheck and a living, and I try never to abuse or be rude to them. And yet, lately, I find these people testing my pati
Family

I think I might just be out of time on this one…

Sam was finally allowed to go home last night. We had a follow-up with his pediatrician today and he should get to go back to school and ease back into normal activity on Monday. Ben is still, somewhat comically, trying to get his new front teeth in. It was very difficult getting out of there. I have rarely wanted to call a nurse a insufficiently_thoughtful_person to her face so badly. They tried to give him 2 vaccines in his two thighs at the same time and didn't restrain his hands while I
Revenant

Revenant in Family

2
Italian Coins

Picking up more competition

In some new, interesting developments, it looks like the 50 Lire category picked up 2 new sets in a day and I'm bumped to #3 for now. I think this happened just yesterday. I kinda had a feeling this would happen and that that would be a 1-year win when I made the set but had no plans to heavily develop it thus year - opting instead to focus on the 500 Lire set. I'm not ruling out building that 50 L set some more and giving the newcomers a bit of a fight. But the 500 Lire has always bee
Revenant

Revenant in Italian Coins

2

The 105 year old French Bird in my house

I picked this up in late 2017 but we were focused on the holidays and an upcoming move so I never go to log-on here and post about picking this up, or even add it to my registry. Back in December my wife gave me the okay to pick up a small gold coin. The original idea I had in mind was to pick up an 1877 for my Netherlands 10G set. The 1877 is the last of the more common dates that I still don't own for that set and at the time leading up to her giving me the okay there was an MS66 on sale
Revenant

Revenant

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Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

A charming looking group of coins, I think.

The Zimbabwe coin submission has arrived back from NGC. So, you people trying to ninja my brain and make me fret can just chill out. (Lookin at you, Mike! ) That said, I have been having an internal dialogue on this and “declared value” along the lines of “I’m wondering if I’m doing this wrong, which may bear further discussion. It is the last of the submissions mailed from the old house, the last of the submissions I had mailed back to my in-laws because of the move. So hopefully no m
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
Revenant

Revenant in Family

1
Family

Collecting cards is more complicated than I would have thought…

So… Ben has gotten in to Yugioh cards… He started watching it on Netflix after he’d been watching lots of Pokemon and Bakugan and other anime and Netflix suggested it. Thank you for that suggestion Netflix… So helpful. So we had a collection of Pokemon cards that was mostly a hand me down from me / my youth, a collection of bakugan, a now rather staggering collection of Beyblades, and now he wants to collect Yugioh Cards and play duel monsters… So, we’ve definitely got t
Revenant

Revenant in Family

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Zimbabwean Coins and Currency

The Zimbabwean $5 coins look more promising this time.

I got the new Zimbabwean $5 coins I ordered in a few days ago and... they look a lot more shiny and nice this time. They actually look shiny and nice this time - there are no dark spots or mint green areas of obvious environmental damage. Unfortunately - no pictures for now. They got packed away a few days ago along with all the other raw coins in 2x2s in the binder. We are now 8 days out from when we're supposed to get the keys to the new place and all non-essentials are rapidly getti
Venezuelan Coins and Currency

Joke not funny - needs Punchline.

In looking at the description for my Venezuelan set again it occurred to me that I never really closed the loop and brought it all back the coins and the set, so I ended up adding a paragraph towards the end that brought my discussion back to that set. But the whole thing got me thinking about an old routine from Ron White, when he stops, seemingingly in the middle of the joke, with no punchline to wrap things up. It just stopped and he said, "Joke not funny! Need Punchline." It was a
European Pocket Change

Got a couple of pages sorted.

While Shandy was napping with the baby, I let Ben have the TV and sat down to continue this project. Shandy sent a picture to her parents recently to let them know where some of our important papers (like our wills) were stored and all of my Father-in-law's coins were visible in the shot, stacked up nearby. I pointed that out to them, and my wife made the comment that my FiL would like seeing that and that knowing something was being done with them. That got me feeling motivated to continue
Family

"Ga" is for Goldfish, "P" is for "Poins"

Sam is obsessed with Goldfish, and shoving them in his mouth all day. He's started saying "Ga" for for Goldfish when he wants them. This means he's working on learning to say "gold," which is a lovely word if you like coins IMO. Meanwhile Ben has recently cropped up with "poins" and telling me he took my "poins." I had thought we'd gotten past this and he'd figured out "coins," but it has made a comeback recently. My wife doesn't want me correcting him too much because she thinks its adorab
Revenant

Revenant in Family

1

Finally Moving on the Falcons (and the Queen's Beasts)

I finally convinced myself to pick up some more air-tite capsules for the British Queen's Beasts coins, since I've been out of them since I picked up the last of the Black Bulls I needed, and now I've ordered three of the Falcon coins. It'll be a while before they arrive because I ordered them with an echeck to keep the costs as low as possible. I've been thinking I needed to do this for a while because Christmas will be here before long and I've been giving these to my Step-father as
Revenant

Revenant

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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
Revenant

Revenant

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A Final Note on the 1877

When I left things off with my last entry talking about this coin, the one unknown, the one X-factor, was, how nice was this coin going to be in-hand and which of the two coins I’d been looking at would have better eye appeal in-person, the MS65 or the MS66. As is required by the nature of online shopping, I’ll never get an answer on the second point. I didn’t buy both coins. I’ll probably never see that MS66 in person. I’ll probably never know if I would have liked it better. As to th
Revenant

Revenant

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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
Revenant

Revenant

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Coins from Aberdeen

In November of last year (2017), very shortly after I got my new job in October, I was sent to Aberdeen to visit the company’s home office for training and to meet all the people I’d be working with remotely face-to-face. My wife lived in England for 3 years and visited Scotand during that time and really wanted to go. We arranged for her parents to watch our son for a week, I bought her an extra ticket to come with me and she stayed in the hotel with me. Since the company was paying for the roo
Revenant

Revenant

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