I know quite a few of us that frequent this place are also fathers. Shandy let me sleep in this morning and, when I got up, she had the boys in Star Wars shirts saying "I am your Son" and one for me that says "I am your Father."

I mentioned elsewhere that I had an ebay auction ending late last night. I followed my practice of putting in my best number and going to bed. It so happened that, when I put in my best bid, i was winning it but my bid was maxed out and if anyone else had bid I would have lost. I still wasn't willing to stay up to 1 AM biting my nails and I still wasn't willing to up my bid, so I decided to just see in the morning. It turns out I won.

The thing I was after? A P-12a note for my Zimbabwe set.

The thing that makes this exciting? This was the last note I needed to have a complete variety set of Zimbabwe 1st dollar Series 2 notes. When I get this in the mail I'll have all 11.

It feels particularly fitting to score this last note on the morning of Father's Day since it's for a set that I got back into in a big way as a way of coping with stress during the 2nd pregnancy and Sam's NICU stay and everything that came later.

I'd always thought it would take me longer and cost me more to get to this point with this set but I've gotten lucky of late - a couple of dealers I buy from have been listing a lot of these lately and I've had some money I could get away with spending so I've, during quarantine, gotten the P-5a, the P-7, the P-9, the P-11a and now the P-12a, moving from being about 50% complete to now having them all.

Of course, I'm still not done with the Series 1 varieties. There's 18 varieties in Series 1 and I have 7 of them... but, maybe, one day.