So one of my stocking stuffers on Christmas morning was a small pocket magnifier that has a light built-in. I saw this and asked my wife, jokingly, “So is this because I’m slowly going blind?” She said, “No! It’s for your coins!” “… and the fact that I’m slowly going blind?”
In early 2016, right around the time Ben was born, I got a 5 mm corneal abrasion right in the middle of my right cornea – it almost split the cornea in half. I was lucky enough that it didn’t cost me use of the eye, but it did cost me a lot of the finer vision in it. There was a fair bit of scarring afterwards in the middle of the cornea. I went from barely ever needing glasses for 20/30-ish vision to getting 20/60 in that eye with my glasses. I’ve noticed the last couple of year that I now have a much harder time making out fine details – and sometimes dates and mint marks on small coins like dark old brown pennies.
This is something that will make you a bigger fan of larger coins, brighter coins. I really had dreams of building a set of civil war tokens one day but I’m starting to question how well that might go for me.
This has caused some sad times over the last 3 years as I realize that I am getting older and things aren’t always going to work as well perhaps… When do you start realizing that you’re not going to last forever? Anyway…
I also got 5 new notes to add to my Zimbabwe 2nd dollar sets and the seller was giving out UV lights for checking / seeing the UV features of notes. The Zimbabwe notes have features that show under UV light but I’ll have to test and see if the light / these features can be seen under / through the PMG holders. I know lots of otherwise transparent plastics can block and absorb UV light, so it might not be possible to use this light or see the UV active security features on graded and encapsulated notes.
I also finally got to take a look at my Zimbabwean dime and was pleasantly surprised. I took a bit of a risk on it as the sellers photos didn’t make the coin look nice / had me thinking there might be some problem areas. The coin looks much better in-hand and shines quite nicely.
My wife took pictures of me opening it. I decided to ham it up a bit for fun.
Of course, this is what most of the morning was really about:
See the train table / playset in the background? Guess who was putting that together at 10:30 PM the night prior, after that same 3 year old came in and woke me up at 5:15 that morning because he wanted to go downstairs, watch his tablet and play with all his old toys, that are not getting a 2nd look now that there are new toys that are now his favorite.
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