I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the coin collecting to build up my Zimbabwe set. The merchant I normally buy from has knocked their prices down recently so I’ve been buying and building the set while the buying is good.

I was bidding on a P-95, 4th dollar, 20 dollar note last night and I ended up having to get it go when another bidder took it just a little higher than I was comfortable paying for it at the moment. The fact that the other bidder bid three times and bid it up to that level was a confirmation to me that I’m clearly not the only one hunting and building sets of these notes graded by PMG (and I suppose others get PCGS graded notes).

It was a bit of a frustrating loss and I don’t know exactly when another one will come up for sale, My regular merchant doesn’t have any that are graded, just ungraded notes and I don’t want to deal with submissions right now. I may go that route eventually and acquire several raw notes and get a paid membership here for submitting them, but right now there are tons of other notes for the set that I need that I can get already graded in good, gem+ grades for low prices so I’m just not willing to go there yet.

eBay is running a 6-8% eBay bucks promotion that I want to take advantage of so I’m probably going to go forward with buying some Trillions series (3rd dollar) notes I’ve been eyeing instead since I lost this one. I may pick up another 1st dollar note as part of that. The 1st dollar notes are awesome and tragically ignored and I’m thinking when this is all over that a solid set of 1st dollar notes will be a point of pride and a strength of this set.

I’ve joked with my wife that this set may end up being a monument to my stress and coping with this pregnancy and the NICU stay. I’ve been obsessing over it more than a bit as a way of having something to focus on as a bit of escapism and stress relief.

Below I've included images of the front and back of my P-12b, just for fun. It's a favorite of mine.