Welcome to the Tarnished Truth. YOUR newsletter. As admitted junky's of this numismatic hobby there are certain things that we seldom think about but are important things to consider. One of the most important is coin storage and preservation. How we store our coins has a direct influence on how these coins will look in twenty, thirty and even fifty years from now. And how these coins look as we well know has much to do with how they will be valued. All metal, whether it be in coin form or not is susceptible to damage by chemical change, and the biggest influence on this change is moisture and temperature. One small trick to help protect your treasures is to have them stored in a multi-layered container system. The old box in a box in a box system. For those coins you have that are still rolled, I have never found anything better than covering the ends well and dipping the ends in hot wax. I have broken open one cent rolls that were put away in the thirties and forties that were completely covered with wax, and they had not one bit of toning or discoloration. There is also silica gel moisture absorbents on the markets now that work well to remove at least some of the moisture from the coins environment. Regardless what you decide is the method you will use to protect your coins, you must remember to check them periodically to see that your methods are indeed working.

Gestated in Breeding Vat Five of the Uberhuman outpost on Phobos, I first arrived on Terra on Bastille Day.Choosing a set of parental units that appeared to fit my priorities and parameters, they tried in vain to raise me as a good little human unit. Quickly giving that up as a bad idea, I was mainly raised under the auspices of the Benevolent Neglect system, burning myself on hot stoves many times. On the deosil side, the program that wove my DNA turned on not only the currently unknown to human science Irony and Sarcasm genes, but made sure I had enough intelligence to find my own buttocks using only a flashlight, both hands and a map. Thus, I was able to avoid the E-vile Minions of The Law, even through puberty, which as most can attest is quite a feat.

Being forced into the public school system, I quickly became bored and began learning on my own. I read (and still read) everything from bad mysteries to tech manuals for obsolete echosonde equipment. Voraciously. Taking a job at age 14 in a machine shop (yeah, I lied about my age, so sue me), I manipulated my classes so that I only had the ones the State required in the morning, and then went off to work. After a month of this, I gave up on going to the classes and worked full time, taking a week off to pass the State Regents exams, thereby passing the course and getting full credit. I understand that loophole has now been closed, can't have smart kids skipping the 200 days of indoctrination, now can we? Giving up on the machine shop job, although I did learn to program a Makino NC miller and lathe, I took about a year off and wandered most of the US with nothing but a .22 pistol and a change of clothes. Worked bussing tables, cleaning toilets, swinging a shovel, pumping gas, and repairing electronics. Tiring of that, I joined the Naval Reserve as a Builder, where they attempted to teach me how to swing a hammer the wrong way. At night, while the rest of the class was indulging in basic metabolic poisons, I studied up for and took ever CLEP and advancement test they had to offer. After mustering out, having gone in at 6'4" 170lbs, I was now 220lbs of solid, well-defined muscle. Took a programming job to pay the bills, lived in a college dormitory basement with some other transients. Six months of that, and I was back down to 170lbs again. Hung around with a lot of SCA types, so I learned quite a bit of blacksmithing and knifesmithing from them during this period. Finally taking a REAL job with a large electronics firm as a junior engineer (yeah, yeah, I lie a lot on job apps), I got back into coins.

At the ripe old age of 8, just as my secondary processors were kicking in, my maternal grandfather introduced me to numismatics. Everything from the Indian Head Cents he collected as a kid (born in 1909, I built him a BU year set for his 90th birthday. And reported zero income that year due to the expenditure!) through the gold pieces his family hid and hoarded when the Great Satan, FDR, decided that money should be backed by hot air. I spent many, many summers out there going through his collection, at a guess the box he kept it in weighed about 200lbs, only half a dozen albums and the rest raw coins in all kinds of boxes, tubes, flips, whatnots. Two cent pieces, three cent pieces (Granpop, some idiot passed a law to mint a coin that would buy ONE STAMP?), seated dollars, bust dollars, large format notes, a little of everything. Now that I had a real job, no wife, no kids, no bad habits, I blew everything on coins. Then the firm ran into a problem. They took on a contract to make a computer that all of us in the hardware section said wouldn't work. Well, it didn't. No matter what we did to it. As part of the "keep out of court" settlement, all us grunts involved with the project were sacked. And blackballed. So I drifted a few more years, started my very first DBA, painting houses and hanging wallpaper. So long as I kept at it and didn't slack off, it was one of the best paying jobs I've ever held. Saw a job opening at a local respiratory equipment manufacturer, and managed to BS them into opening an R&D department with me running it. Did very well there, got them a lot of patents, invented the one moving part self-contained compressor/motor to run nebulizers and vaporizers, married my secretary, then got a better job offer from the company we were renting a house from. Ran their MIS department so well we won a couple of local business efficiency awards, had Mobil Oil try to buy me away from them (turned them down, the job was in Virgina), had two daughters.

Then it hit the fan. Working late one night I collapsed. Completely blind and both legs paralyzed. I'd gotten minimal sight back and partial use of my legs by the time the receptionist showed up in the morning to open the place. Three years of tests before they figure out it's Multiple Sclerosis. At least, that's how it appeared. The *very first* MRI I had done by a doctor I won't name actually showed it conclusively. I didn't find out for three years, when we moved further out on Long Island and I had records transferred. He'd supplied a letter to the referring physician saying it was definitely MS, but he didn't want to give me the bad news, so he told me it was optic neuritis and would go away with time. After several medical misadventures with steroidal therapy, I ended up with pseudoarthritic arthralgia. That's DocSpeak for all the cartilage in my system is as full of holes and cracks as swiss cheese. So now I sit at home, play with coins, annoy people on mailing lists, bribe newsletter editors to make sure JD's bio gets published before this one, and make innocuous statements of fact that scare predatory dealers so much they threaten lawsuits and destroy another Coin club.