After a really tough day at work, after a day of not feeling particularly special in any way and feeling a little despairing, I shared a good meal with a good friend, and then came home to discover a Presidential Merit Award from The Elongated Collectors in the mail. Completely unexpected. It's a certificate and a beautiful elongated Kennedy half ( Read more... )

1) LJ and post-writing: I'm getting lazy about my LJ posts, posting a lot of "5 Things" lists and not going in-depth. Bad me. But I've got two in-depth posts brewing that I hope to add this weekend: one on the Oscar-nominated Animated Short Films, which I saw last night with varina8 and one on all the evangelizing going on online about self-publishing and ( Read more... )

I have other things to post about (like the department retreat and today's delightful concert) but first I want to post about the package I received from my brother and sister-in-law. I am virtually certain that my gearhead friends (among them jaylake and autojim) will recognize the tradition I'm about to share, but it's new to me ( Read more... )

Today on Facebook, a penny-smashing friend of mine told me that she remembers how upset I was today 12 years ago. She remembers my posting the smashed-penny email list about the events of the day. It reminded me of the editorial I wrote for TEC News, the elongated coin club newsletter I was editing at the time. I used it for the issue of the ( Read more... )

Morning businessThe original plan for yesterday (Friday) was to go to the Musee D'Orsay in the morning and then spend the afternoon at the Catacombs. What we realized when we rose was that we were pretty much out of groceries (we've been eating breakfast in the apartment each day to save a little cash), and had to do something about that. We also ( Read more... )

In case you ever wonder why I'm a sometime numismatist (that's "coin collector" to you lay peoples), check out this article about America's rarest coin, and the history and mystery behind it. This is the stuff that bestsellers are made of (and also, maybe, a fantasy story . . .). You can't hold this particular coin in your hand, but you can ( Read more... )

skidspoppe is living in Hungary these days, teaching and enjoying living in Europe. One of the ways he's enjoying his time there is by smashing coinage. This weekend in the mail, I received a smashed forint from St. Stephen Bassilica in Budapest. And what is shown on this Hungarian elongated coin? A relic: a severed hand. This is a first for me: a ( Read more... )

National Public Radio is currently running a series of stories about I-95, the north-south highway that runs along the east coast. This week's installment is about the new travel plaza in Delaware (I stopped at the old one a number of times growing up on family road trips and school field trips). And at the very end of the 10-minute story (which is ( Read more... )

By Saturday morning, I was actually a little tired of the convention. I was beginning to be aware of how much the trip was costing me purely in required spending (i.e., meals and incidentals) even without having spent all that much money on the bourse--and since the budget was tight, it was hard to enjoy the bourse without much in the way of ( Read more... )

Friday was Meeting Day for me, the day on which all of the TEC meetings were held: Board of Governors Meeting, General Membership Meeting, Fellowship Meeting. The festivities started extra early for me because I got up early to print out the auction catalog I'd created on Thursday, and enjoyed some unwelcome adventures getting it taken care of. ( Read more... )