I had to shovel snow this morning. We had an inch or two of heavy slushy snow overnight. It was far worse to the north and east, so I won’t complain.

I will use the snow as a timely reminder of the seasonality of the coin hobby. Sooner or later it will truly warm up and stay warmed up. Then collectors, being only human, will embark on their summertime activities. Whether it is gardening or water skiing, I don’t know, but their attention will shift away from the hobby and to other things that have to be done in the seasonal moment.

This means coin collecting will slow down a tad. Most years it does. The truly hot years override the seasonal pattern, but even with bullion as high as it is, conditions don’t seem to me to be such that the seasonal pattern will be overruled.

The question in my mind is will hobbyist choose to take time away from the hobby in the weeks of summer prior to the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money at the end of July in Baltimore, or will they choose the weeks afterwards?

Or will the law of averages work out to evenly spread the downtime among all collectors?

This question is too deep for me. Suffice it to say that if there is a noticeable slowdown this summer, that is an ordinary event. It won’t be the end of the hobby as we know it. It will be more like the hobby as old-timers have always known it.

The same thing is true with this snow. It doesn’t snow every April 9 in Iola, but it happens often enough to keep the idea alive in my memory.

As Chet Krause told me once, the only month he hasn’t seen snow in Iola is August. That’s a scary thought.

I hope it isn’t going to be one of those days. It has taken 10 minutes just for me to sign into my computer and get everything up and working.

I have a lot of work to do on the 2009 edition of the North American Coin and Prices book.

The charts of price performance need updating. These are a record of how certain coins have fared on the market since 1972. Some have really zoomed. Some have been up gently. The data is interesting to look at.

This year’s pattern seems to be that the truly rare stuff, like an 1802 half dime or an 1878-S half dollar, did incredibly well. The half dime in F-12 jumped from $40,000 to $85,000 and the half dollar went from $22,000 to $45,000 in F-12.

The meat-and-potatoes stuff, like an F-12 1914-D Lincoln cent, moved ahead by just $10 to $395.

None of these issues would get any points for being anywhere near the finest known. It is nice to see that solid collector coins have a strong underlying demand.

I suspect that the two that did so well might have been a bit underpriced in the 2008 edition, but even so, the numbers are strong.

The year 2009 will be the centennial of the Lincoln cent design and I would expect that prices will accelerate higher for the key and semi-key collectible dates.

Wish me luck. If it took 10 minutes to sign in, I don’t know what the spreadsheet is going to do to me.

Is it just me or was there more April Fool’s stuff around this year than last? I enjoy a good joke and a good laugh, but what happens when Web searches five years from now turn up April Fool’s stories?

Speculative questions aside, yesterday was no joke for the U.S. Mint. It began offering the 2008-W uncirculated gold American Eagle coins. I can’t imagine that the urge to buy was quite as strong as it might have been last week. Gold dropped below $900 an ounce and closed at $882.90.

I know the Mint cannot price its offerings based on hourly or daily price fluctuations, so the appropriate response to yesterday is to do nothing and let markets go where they will.

Even with a strong urge to be the first on the block to own the 2008-W coins, I imagine many potential buyers were doing the calculations as the day progressed.

Let’s see, the one-ounce coin is priced at $1,119.95. That’s nearly a 27 percent mark-up from yesterday’s close.

Buy now? Wait?

Buy now? Wait?

If the price of gold pops higher today, the reluctance to buy is reduced as it gets replaced by a fear of missing out on a buying opportunity.

We will know how things went when the first sales statistics come out, but that is at least a week away.

Were you a first day buyer, or a first day hesitater?

I see gold has slid below $900 this morning and silver is under $17, but I don’t want to dwell on those numbers as I write this.

I have just returned from a one-day show put on by the Mansfield Numismatic Society in Willimantic, Conn. It was held Sunday, March 30. I spent yesterday morning in transit.

My mission was to give two Numismatic Ambassador Awards. The award is given to hobby workers and volunteers who make organized numismatics what it is.

The first recipient was C. John Ferreri. He has been the show chairman since the first one in 1973. The place the award was given was at the entrance to the old high school gymnasium that is the location of the 75-table show.

Roger Durand blew the whistle at about 11:50 a.m. like a high school basketball referee and the room became silent – if you can imagine such a thing on a bourse floor. However, I had spent more than half an hour prior warning dealers at their tables that it was going to happen and not to think something was wrong.

I cited Ferreri for his work with the MNS and many in the room spontaneously clapped.

As the president of the MNS said, afterwards, “John is the man. He’s the life blood of the club.”

As a surprise, we had persuaded the second recipient to travel down from the Boston area to be present to see Ferreri receive his award. Then the second award went to Tom Rockwell of North Andover.

He is, I believe 96 years old, and he has been a stalwart in three clubs, the Boston Numismatic Society, where he has been secretary, the Currency Club of New England, where he has also been secretary and the Boston Numismatic Society, where he has been treasurer.

Adding all of the terms together, he has spent about 100 years as a hobby volunteer according to Durand’s arithmetic.

“I never thought I’d get it,” the surprised Rockwell told me over and over again as we posed for photos with the plaque.

Well, the people at the show thought it was about time they both got the awards. I was happy to be in the right place at the right time to make it so.

Then it was back to business.

I have never had the pleasure of visiting the state of New Mexico. I seem to recall that my uncle’s green 1960 Ford station wagon had a sticker in the back window indicating that he, my aunt and two cousins had made it there on a visit once.

I have known people from New Mexico and others who moved there to retire. I have even read about it in books about hot retirement places. The American Numismatic Association has even had a show there in Albuquerque during my career, but my travels have never taken me there.

It is funny how these thoughts pop into my head when I think about the New Mexico state quarter that will be released April 7. But then, that is part of the point.

Collecting coins is as much about the person who is doing the collecting as the coins themselves. The New Mexico quarter will educate Americans about a state that entered the Union in 1912 and its Zia sun symbol design.

But every American who acquires one of the new quarters and takes a moment to look at it will make the coin his or her own by the thoughts that come to be associated with it.

Will they know where New Mexico is? Do they know the name of the governor?

It is fortunate for the hobby that Gov. Bill Richardson thinks the coin is important enough to head the state’s dignitaries in introducing the quarter with Mint Director Ed Moy.

Richardson has the honor of having been in the cabinet in Washington, D.C., when the program was authorized by Congress and now is a participant near the conclusion of its 10-year run.

New Mexico’s motto is “Land of Enchantment.” Enchantment is a good word describing the basic appeal of coin collecting, don’t you think?

In my collecting career, medals have been the stepchildren to coins. Most collectors I knew years ago had no interest in them. After all, they weren’t coins. They were second class.

That may sound a little harsh, but the words capture the attitude. Sure there are niche collectors of Inaugural medals and other things. Generalists will become reacquainted with them as we near the Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration of the next President. The quadrennial bloom will be on that particular rose.

Nearly 30 years ago the John Wayne medal took the hobby by storm. I didn’t buy one, but I remember reporting on the phenomenon.

I raise this particular topic this morning as I look at the sales totals for First Spouse bronze medals. We know the gold coins for Martha Washington, Abigail Adams and Miss Liberty standing in for Mrs. Jefferson sold out in hours. Those totaled 40,000 apiece.

The bronze medal sales totals for the same three are 39,016, 36,426 and 34,268. Buyers of these pay far less for the same design as appears on the gold coins – just $3.50. But there is no real hope of making any kind of speculative profit, so the purchasing impulse has more to do with the collector impulse and the simple pleasure in owning them.

Those totals rise by 50 percent if you count the pieces included in the 2007 Presidential $1 Coin and First Spouse Medal Sets. These were priced at $7.95 each.

Admittedly, these totals are small when compared to, say, the 480,176 Presidential $1 Coin Proof Sets sold so far for 2008, but they strike me as significant.

Now I am tainted by my generational attitudes to medals. Has that attitude been thrown off by newcomers who have no memory of circulation finds, proof Ike dollars and the first U.S. Olympic coins?

Perhaps. What do you think?

Election years bring out politicians and campaign promises. Normally, these do not touch upon numismatics, but 28 years ago this week, candidate Ronald Reagan made an appearance 13 miles to the south of Iola in Courthouse Square in Waupaca. I was there. I listened to his speech.

Incorporated into it was a promise to make the U.S. dollar as good as gold again. That is not exactly an overt pledge to restore the gold standard that was abandoned in 1933 or the gold exchange standard that was abandoned in 1971, but it was as close to the subject as any American leader who had a strong chance of winning the presidency has ever gone since President Nixon closed the gold window.

He was as good as his word. He appointed the U.S. Gold Commission. Its report in 1982 did not bring back the gold standard, but it did make the topic a respectable one in government circles again, something that had not been the case for the prior decade.

The door was opened to striking gold coins again. The Olympic coin legislation had a $10 gold coin component and it was not laughed out of Congress or condemned. It passed and the Olympic $10 of 1984 was the first American gold coin struck since 1933. It sold reasonably well to collectors.

It was followed by the 1986 Statue of Liberty $5, which sold out in just a few weeks. It was a first hint of pent-up gold coin demand.

This was then followed by the creation of the American Eagle program in 1986 and we were off to the races. The gold standard did not come back but Americans were given an American option to invest in if they wanted gold to be a part of their investments.

Perhaps someday a candidate who has more electoral pull than Ron Paul will say something positive about gold or some other numismatic subject.