Bar One

Presented here is my first silver bar. I have pounds of coins&rounds so when I decided to convert some steem into silver earlier this year, and then @silverd decided to convert some silver into steem in May, and it just so happened I'd powered down enough to buy it, well... who am I to thumb my nose at destiny?

There's a strange little story that accompanies these images and I will tell it down below. For now just check out how nice this plain little bar looks.

The back side is classic, simple. Beautiful. (Thanks to @trishlarimer for making these images.)

I almost didn't get this bar.

About a week after we did the deal I went online and tracked the package with the number @silverd gave me. According to the post office it had been delivered days earlier "at or near" my mailbox. But like any kid waiting on a new toy I'd been keeping an eagle eye on that.

It took a couple of days to figure out what had happened. The package was delivered to the wrong address by a substitute while our regular postal carrier was on vacation. But with the help of our regular carrier and her boss Trish tracked the package to a house several blocks away. (Each package is scanned when delivered and we used the geo-location data.)

We were warned by the PO boss that we might worry about visiting the house, as it's located in a "bad neighborhood". Trish reminded the boss that we also lived in this neighborhood.

It took a couple of drive-bys to talk to anyone at that house, which was, I hate to admit, one of the more run-down abodes near the edge of our neighborhood. We live in a very old section of town and sometimes when the old folks die, the younger ones don't care about what's left to them. Blows my mind but there it is.

Anyway, the guy she talked to in broken English was from Mexico and definitely wanted to help us get what was ours and leave. He made the point repeatedly that he didn't live there but was friends with the girl who did, and he had no trouble opening the house to retrieve the bar. Very nice fellow who tried to explain as best he could that the girl who lived there simply didn't know what to do and was afraid to even put it back into the mailbox.

In the end, thanks to @silverd shipping with a tracking number, thanks to our carrier and the PO boss, thanks to technology, and thanks to the integrity of random humans, the bar finally found its way to its new home.

Other than the fact that this is ten ounces of shiny, to me this bar represents the bulk of earnings and awards for my short stories that I published on steem in 2017 and 2018 before Kosh died. To me, this is the best piece of silver I own.