My wife somewhat randomly brought up about a week ago that she and I are both "Tigers" - We were both born in the year of the Tiger for the Chinese Zodiac - 1986 specifically.

She teaches English to Chinese kids and what brought this up was some parents had been asking other teachers if their young child was a "pig," meaning born in 2019, which was the year of the pig, which Samuel is, as it happens. So this got her curious and she looked up what we were and what Ben and Sam were and what the traits are that are associated with those animals and all that good Bull.

When she started talking about this I pulled out my old Lunar 1 series Tiger, Monkey (Ben is a monkey, and, boy, is he one), and Pig coins. I also pulled out my Lunar Series 2 Tiger from 2010 but mentioned that I didn't have the Series 2 Monkey or Pig coins.

I showed her pictures of the designs of the Series 2 Monkey and Pig and she likes the fact that both coins show an adult with one or more children, and I'm using this, with the fact that they were made on our son's birthyears, to get permission to go after the Series 2 Monkey and Pig coins and not count it towards my normal collecting budget. I am not opportunistic! I swear!

Anyway... I won an auction for the Monkey coin. I'm going to see if I can get a 5% eBay bucks deal and snap up a 2019 pig coin for about the same price. Similar to what I did with the 1/4th oz gold eagles I'm going to try to get MS70s for both and get matching labels for both. This monkey coin is "One of the First 1000 Struck" but the Pig coin I'm eyeing for Sam will once again be an "Early Release," because that's exactly what he is. The seller I'm looking at buying the pig from has 4 of them so I'm going to wait for the 5% deal for now, but if they look like they might sell out I'll probably just snap one up to not let the coin I want get away.

On an unrelated note, we just got back from spending the weekend at a rented pool house for her birthday, which is how she wanted to celebrate it - so I'm not spending all our fun money on pieces of shiny metal anyway. The trip gave me a chance to prove once again that my strength as a photographer doesn't necessarily lie in coin photography, even though I do enjoy it. I will never get tired of taking pictures of her though.