Normally I would post a blog on Thursday morning, but this week because of a server migration issue, my ability to post anything will be blocked. This is a situation that could possibly last all day. Rather than have people wondering what happened, I figure it is better to write something now.

The Friday posting should proceed normally.

In my younger and more impatient days, I used to think writing about the weather’s effects on numismatics as a waste of space. I didn’t care about the weather and I wasn’t interested in what others thought about the weather or how it affected them.

But now that I am middle-aged, I have personally experienced the cabin fever aspect of late winter and the urge to ditch the indoors for some activity outside. I am much more closely attuned to the seasonal pattern in coin collecting.

I find myself writing about it every year.

We are approaching summer. Collectors have lives beyond their sets and the summertime is when many of them throttle back and plan summer vacations.

If you are already thinking about your summer plans, join the club. You are a part of the seasonal hobby pattern.

Commercial activity slows down. Dealers decide they can safely leave their businesses untended for a week or two to go off and recharge their batteries.

In the years that the market is booming, the human tendency to want to get away is overruled by another very human tendency to take advantage of profitable opportunities that are easier to find in booms.

This year the market is not booming. It seems to me that the human need to get away for awhile will have ample time this summer to express itself.

After Memorial Day this trend will begin to kick in, but more likely, it will be after the June Baltimore show for coin collectors and the Memphis paper money show in late June that those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, to borrow Nat King Cole’s words, kick in.

When the Los Angeles American Numismatic Association convention gets going at the beginning of August, I will start looking for the seasonal upturn to begin.

So if you find yourself wondering what might be happening in July, perhaps it is time to plan your own getaway to refresh yourself and come back vigorous and ready to commence playing the great numismatic game.

April Mint production numbers have been released and those who have an interest have been focusing heavily on cents, nickels and dimes.

The cents make a natural focus because of the attention being paid to the four new designs this year, the second of which will reach the public beginning May 14. Almost 230 million more have been produced, all being of the second Lincoln design. This number leaves it on track to match the output for the first design, but of course, one month's production does not guarantee a pattern any further than to confirm a Mint preference to run at a fairly even pace.

Nickels and dimes are being scrutinized because there might not be any more struck this year. Through April, nickel production was just under 40 million at each of the two circulating coin production facilities in Philadelphia and Denver.

Dime production is higher than nickel production, reaching almost 100 million at Philadelphia and 50 million at Denver.

So what do I do? I decided to look at the Territorial quarter mintages.

What do they show? In the month of April Philadelphia struck 26.52 million coins. These are all very likely the Guam design. Denver struck 19.6 million.

Since there are six designs this year, that leaves two production months for each design, though striking the D.C. quarter began before the beginning of the calendar year.

If the quarter numbers are half of a two-month run, Guam totals would fall from the Puerto Rican mintage totals, but by less than you might think. Philadelphia would be on track to match its Puerto Rico ouput, and Denver would drop from 86 million to roughly 40 million, or 39.2 million if you precisely double the 19.6 million April production total.

May production could rise, knocking these numbers into a cocked hat, or the production rate could fall yet further, amplifying the sense of scarcity among collectors.

Mintages of 40 million or 50 million quarters is a novelty for collectors because it has been almost a half century since numbers like these were the norm.

Collectors being collectors will likely pay close attention to these numbers and perhaps squirrel away more of them than they should.

The low 1955 output caused that year to stand out for Washington quarter collectors, but because collectors of the time were guided by the mintage totals, quite a few have survived in high grades. The 1955-D has a mintage of just about 3.2 million, but right on up to about MS-63, the prices for the coin hardly differ from issues with 10 times that mintage.

Will that kind of pricing wll play out for Territorial quarters 50 years from now?

Print ads are still effective as a way to buy the coins you need. I spoke to Julian Jarvis for the Coin Chat Radio program that went live yesterday at www.coinchatradio.com and he casually mentioned in our off-air chat that his recent quarter-page buy ad in Numismatic News pleased him and he was placing more.

When the first ad ran, I saw it, but I didn’t really study it. After my conversation with Julian I was curious to find out what he was paying for state quarters. Some of the prices surprised me greatly.

How about $40.50 for the P or D Georgia BU roll? While mintages were relatively low for the 1999 year of issue, Philadelphia still cranked out 451.2 million and Denver 488.7 million.

Tennessee, was less surprising. It has been freakishly unavailable since the coin was released in 2002. The P or D rolls are priced at $38. Did the coin coloring business really use that many coins? It has a nice guitar design and it is an indirect tribute to Elvis. Mintages were 361.6 million for Philly and 286.5 for Denver.

Remember, these are buy prices, not retail prices.

What really blew my mind, though, was the price for Illinois quarter rolls. It is $31 for either mint. Perhaps I wasn’t paying appropriate attention. Lincoln is the theme, but the design never appealed to me. The mintages for the 2003 quarter were 225.8 million for Philadelphia and 237.4 million for Denver.

When looking at those numbers I might be tempted to exclaim, “Aha!” However, there are other states with similar mintages that are nowhere near that price.

While I was never a collector of the coins by the BU roll, I did have a roll of Connecticut quarters at one time because the local bank got in a supply. I kept it for several years after its 1999 release, but finally spent the coins figuring the 688.7 million Philadelphia coins and 657.9 million Denver coins would guarantee its commonness for all eternity.

Guess what? Connecticut has a buy price of $24.75. Who’d a thunk it?

But Julian knows what he is doing. He wouldn’t be paying those prices if he didn’t think there was a ready buyer further down the supply chain.

It is amazing what you can learn from an ad.

Gold bugs love to poke fun at economist British economist John Maynard Keynes. He called gold a barbarous relic. Gold bugs have been replying since the 1920s, that if it is a relic, why is it so important?

Also, the current price of around $900 an ounce and news of Chinese buying seems to indicate a robustness that is anything but a relic.

Fun aside, the bright popular image of Keynes as being out of touch and the leader of a school of thought in economics that let inflationary demons loose in the world can be blinding and obscure the critical times when he was right.

One of those times was in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash. Early on he recognized the destructive deflationary wave that was swamping the world economy. He was dismissed at the time as peddling inflationary nostrums that were unsound that no rational person could support.

That sounds awfully similar to the current criticisms of the bank bailouts. What if the proponents of the bank bailouts are right and deflation is the greater danger?

It took more than three years for the Depression to unfold in all its ugliness. We are hardly more than two-thirds of a year into the present post-Lehman Brothers failure problems.

In the spring of 1930 many thought the worst had passed. It is easy to be optimistic in the spring. It is spring 2009.

We seem to still be standing even though we have witnessed housing prices down by 30 percent from the peak, oil down by 66 percent from the peak and, my favorite economic indicator, Mint coin production, which is down by roughly the same percentage as oil.

Those numbers look like deflation. If that is so, how long can the price of gold buck the trend?

Ever see a 5-year-old get a shiny red fire truck for Christmas or some other gift that he wanted badly?

Then you have an idea of the excited tone of voice I heard on the phone when a collector from Memphis gave me a jingle.

He wanted me to know that large numbers of Mint State state quarters were being released by the banks in Memphis. He said they were in original rolls.

The state quarters that he had encountered in this form, he said, were New York, Texas, Maryland and Vermont.

He just wanted me to know about this. I appreciate it. It is amazing what I learn from the spontaneous calls from readers.

Sure the world seems all agog about Twitter messages or regular e-mails and cable news programs seem to be less about news and more about simply begging for viewers to send messages, but much useful information still comes to me in the form of telephone calls and U.S. Postal Service mail deliveries.

I would expect that if collectors undertake a canvas of other banks in other major cities that they might just find either supplies of state quarters backed up in the banking system or quantities cashed in by coin owners now down on their luck because of the severe recession.

However, they got there, now is the time to cherry-pick through the quarters to find the highest grades possible. Remember that original rolls might just contain some coins that can make an MS-70 grade, which in the long term is a better hold than “mere” MS-65 coins, especially for the state quarters that have astronomically high mintages.

The best part is this effort is that it takes time but little money as these coins can be acquired for face value.

Why not jump into this and let me know what you find in your neck of the woods?

Are collectors losing the ability to think independently? Some days I wonder.

I cannot tell you how many e-mails I receive where the writer expounds upon a topic, a specific course of action and then ends by asking me if he should do it. It usually involves buying something to make money.

I am not an investment advisor. I believe in collecting coins methodically over time, building nicely matched sets that please the eye.

Because I am not an investment advisor does not mean that I don’t recognize profits can be made in coins. Long-term collectors who follow the traditional hobby path usually make money unless perhaps the object of their ardor is XF Jefferson nickels.

I am also aware of the touts online. Buy this. Buy that. It will go to the moon. All the while the writer, often anonymous, is busily selling whatever it is online. The only person making a killing is the tout.

That’s not collecting.

If you want to run with the touts, go for it at your own risk. Often what happens afterwards is I get withering e-mails blaming greedy dealers, the U.S. Mint and any other target that comes within range.

Usually after reading this kind of message I think that I have saved a family dog somewhere from being kicked out of frustration.

It is human nature, but it is not collecting.

There is nothing wrong from indulging the urge to make a killing from time to time. My introduction to this was my scramble to buy a 1968-S proof set on the secondary market when it was heading for the moon. The touts of the era were pointing to $50. I paid $15. Issue price was $5. Persons who bought directly from the Mint and got early delivery had a nice tripling of their money at that point.

The set hit $20. I felt ecstatic. But then the bottom fell out. Eventually, the set fell under issue price. I see it is being sold in retail ads for $6.75.

But I received more for my $15 than a proof set. I received a lesson in life that told me to recognize what it was I was doing and to know that even my best guess will not guarantee a profit.

Swine flu is not really a numismatic topic, but with all the media focused on it, it is difficult to resist writing a little bit about it.

For individual collectors, if we feel there is a risk from interacting with other people for the duration of the potential epidemic, what can be more ideal than retreating to our homes and our numismatic interests?

The Internet will allow us to interact with others if we so choose to do so, but perhaps the best use of unexpected home time is the possibility to learn something new, or explore a familiar topic in slightly greater depth.

Without outside distractions, the chance to concentrate and to learn is enhanced. Carve out an hour or two. Turn off your cell phone. Tell any and all family members that this island of time is yours alone and you are going to spend it with your hobby.

Then simply luxuriate in the ability to give the topic of your choice your full attention.

Now your system might be shocked because you have blocked outside stimuli. Then again, you might find that you enjoy focused numismatic time so much that you will try to do it on a regularly scheduled basis instead of catching a few minutes here and there.

Numismatics cannot cure or mitigate swine flu, but it can cure any sense of being trapped where you happen to be. The whole world can be yours without actually physically exposing yourself to it.

I am not in the office Friday morning and will not be in a convenient location to post at the usual time, so I will write a few words ahead of time and hope that you won’t be too disappointed going into the weekend.

Of course, if something truly major happens during the interval between when this is written and posted and when the next one goes up on Monday, well, that is the risk.

Just know that I will be back at my desk on Monday morning.

There. I hope that wasn’t too painful.