Revenant

It sounds like your wife is having the same problem as mine did with our second child. My wife was eventually put on bed rest. No climbing stairs, no lifting, and very little of anything else. She was good about it though and came through it to full term with a healthy boy who is now 30 years old! With the birth of her second child at risk my wife like a good mother never complained about what she needed to do. If you'd like for me to explain exactly what happened, message me and I'll give you my phone number. Otherwise, congratulations to both you and all the other award winners for 2018! There are so many fine sets out there and this years winners are the cream of the crop! Oh by the way, good luck on completing your 2019 coin buying goals. I look forward to reading about them and how they came about.

Gary

Hi Revenant,

First off, I'd like to send my best wishes to you and your wife as you guys get through what is sounding like a difficult pregnancy.  My fiancee and I do not have any children and we've decided to adopt when we do, so I cannot imagine how hard it can be.  However, I do know how it is when someone you love is going through a major health issue.  In the past couple of years, my fiancee's father has been treated for prostate cancer (he's cancer free now), my mom was diagnosed with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis (a very nasty autoimmune disease, but she's doing well now) and my sister had major gallbladder problems which led to her having her gallbladder out (thankfully, she too is doing well now also).  It's scary stuff, but I know you guys will get through it.  I'm sending good vibes your way!

Thanks for the kind words on my unexpected win as well (I actually finished that set years ago!).  And congratulations to you on a well-deserved win for your journals and on the acceptance of your paper!  I'm in academia myself (I'm writing my dissertation for my Doctor of Education degree currently), so I know how big of a deal that is.  I'm planning on publishing my work once my dissertation is completed and accepted.  I changed fields from history to education (more opportunities and better pay), so I'm not as accomplished as you are in the publishing area but someday, I hope to be!

It sounds like you have good goals for 2019 going forward.  As for me, I'm going to use my NGC grading credit from my win to work towards expanding the little coin sales venture that my fiancee and I have been working on for the past four or so years......I can undertake some experiments with grading different things for resale with that, something I'm looking forward to.  We'd like to expand out into doing more World coins, and the grading credit will help us grade some things that have been sitting around for a bit, waiting for the right moment.  As for collecting, I think I'm going to keep working on my paper money collection and possibly trying to hunt up the pieces I need to finish my other Ottoman Nickel Para collections.  I want them in Mint State though, so that's going to be a very slow go!

Congrats again on the well deserved win, and on the upcoming new addition to your family!

Cheers!

~Tom

37 minutes ago, Mohawk said:

Hi Revenant,

First off, I'd like to send my best wishes to you and your wife as you guys get through what is sounding like a difficult pregnancy.  My fiancee and I do not have any children and we've decided to adopt when we do, so I cannot imagine how hard it can be.  However, I do know how it is when someone you love is going through a major health issue.  In the past couple of years, my fiancee's father has been treated for prostate cancer (he's cancer free now), my mom was diagnosed with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis (a very nasty autoimmune disease, but she's doing well now) and my sister had major gallbladder problems which led to her having her gallbladder out (thankfully, she too is doing well now also).  It's scary stuff, but I know you guys will get through it.  I'm sending good vibes your way!

Thanks for the kind words on my unexpected win as well (I actually finished that set years ago!).  And congratulations to you on a well-deserved win for your journals and on the acceptance of your paper!  I'm in academia myself (I'm writing my dissertation for my Doctor of Education degree currently), so I know how big of a deal that is.  I'm planning on publishing my work once my dissertation is completed and accepted.  I changed fields from history to education (more opportunities and better pay), so I'm not as accomplished as you are in the publishing area but someday, I hope to be!

It sounds like you have good goals for 2019 going forward.  As for me, I'm going to use my NGC grading credit from my win to work towards expanding the little coin sales venture that my fiancee and I have been working on for the past four or so years......I can undertake some experiments with grading different things for resale with that, something I'm looking forward to.  We'd like to expand out into doing more World coins, and the grading credit will help us grade some things that have been sitting around for a bit, waiting for the right moment.  As for collecting, I think I'm going to keep working on my paper money collection and possibly trying to hunt up the pieces I need to finish my other Ottoman Nickel Para collections.  I want them in Mint State though, so that's going to be a very slow go!

Congrats again on the well deserved win, and on the upcoming new addition to your family!

Cheers!

~Tom

 

Thanks all around on that. I don't know if your program is the same on this front but we were required to get two first-author peer-reviewed publications before we were allowed to graduate with our Ph.D.s Conference papers weren't good enough. Being 2nd author or lower wasn't good enough. So that provided quite an incentive to publish. I've written a lot of technical papers but writing my dissertation was one of the hardest things I ever did. It took months. It wasn't even that it took that much time - it's just mentally and emotionally draining and the lead up to the defense is a stressful time. Good luck with it. I'm sure you'll do great.

My 2011 win was similar - I hadn't changed anything with that set for 2-3 years when I won. There's a lot of competition for those sets with the 12,000+ members and I'm sure they have to work their way "down the list" sometimes. I honestly don't even know how they approach it every year given the thousands of sets out there. I know any set that isn't at least 50% complete isn't considered and I'm sure they have screens in place based on what percentage of the coins have images and descriptions... but that still has to leave a lot of sets.

I've mostly known lack-luster to poor performance on grading my own coins in the past so if you're reasonably good at it you earn my respect there. Good luck with your efforts.

4 hours ago, Revenant said:

Thanks all around on that. I don't know if your program is the same on this front but we were required to get two first-author peer-reviewed publications before we were allowed to graduate with our Ph.D.s Conference papers weren't good enough. Being 2nd author or lower wasn't good enough. So that provided quite an incentive to publish. I've written a lot of technical papers but writing my dissertation was one of the hardest things I ever did. It took months. It wasn't even that it took that much time - it's just mentally and emotionally draining and the lead up to the defense is a stressful time. Good luck with it. I'm sure you'll do great.

My 2011 win was similar - I hadn't changed anything with that set for 2-3 years when I won. There's a lot of competition for those sets with the 12,000+ members and I'm sure they have to work their way "down the list" sometimes. I honestly don't even know how they approach it every year given the thousands of sets out there. I know any set that isn't at least 50% complete isn't considered and I'm sure they have screens in place based on what percentage of the coins have images and descriptions... but that still has to leave a lot of sets.

I've mostly known lack-luster to poor performance on grading my own coins in the past so if you're reasonably good at it you earn my respect there. Good luck with your efforts.

Hi again Revenant,

Thankfully, I don't have to have any publications done for my doctorate.  What I have to do is conduct an original research project that addresses an existing gap in educational scholarship and informs higher educational practice.  I'm undertaking a phenomenology which explores the factors which influence the satisfaction levels of college-level distance learning teachers with their jobs and the experience of teaching online.  I'm still in the proposal phase, but it's already a lot of work!  But it's rewarding and it's something that I feel could make a real difference for people working in my field, so that's an exciting prospect for me as well going into it.  Thanks for the well wishes!  I'll take all I can get pertaining to the dissertation (and other areas of life too!).

As far as my own grading skills, I actually do pretty well these days......almost all of the coins in my sets are ones that I bought raw and graded myself.  It took a few years and several mistakes, but I can honestly say that both myself and my fiancee learned from each one (she collects and grades coins too), so between the two of us, we do pretty well now.  But, trust me, we took our lumps in learning.  I also buy almost everything for our little vestpocket venture raw and submit it myself, so our skills come in very handy there as that's where most of the profit comes in with our model.  It's fun to do it that way because we have a bunch of little flea markets, antique malls and other stores of a similar nature around the region we live in and it's a blast for us to take a break from our schoolwork (my fiancee is working on a PhD in Computer Science right now) and go shopping for both the business and our collections.  Some of the best stress relief I know of, and it's profitable too.  All good stuff!

I was delighted, but very surprised, to see that my Napoleon typeset received a Best Classic Set Award as announced by NGC this week. This came as a bit of a shock as the set is not yet complete, although it is not far off. I do have a raw coin for one of the vacant slots which I should really get around to sending to NGC, particularly now that the gaps stand out more than ever!

Congratulations to all the Award winners, the many great sets in the Registry highlight the diversity and global nature of coin collecting, however it just shows how little I know about anything, and that there is so much left to discover.

[my dissertation was long long ago, although I do have two on my desk at the moment that I am the examiner for!]