2 Piaster Egypt 1944, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

I promise this is my last coin post for a while. But this hexagonal one was just weird enough to photograph. It seems to be a 2 piaster coin from Egypt in AH1363 = 1944. Looks like they made them round for a few years before that, and then switched to hexagonal when they dropped the fineness from .833 to .500 silver. They only seem to have made this version for one year. After that there was a disruption in coin production during the transition from the monarchy to a republic. In this one's worn condition, it's probably not worth much more than the metal value of about a dollar.

Hunter, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

And here's Michelle posing in her hunter costume just after her part in the little kids' play.

Violin, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

I don't have any good pictures of Christine from the play, so here's one from her violin recital so that she doesn't feel left out. (They read this blog occasionally, and if I talk too much about one girl and not the others, they WILL notice...)

Cowardly Lion, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

Annie gets ready to play the Cowardly Lion in her school's Wizard of Oz play. Christine was Toto.

Mystery Coin.jpg, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

I found this mystery coin in my junk bin. Most of these come from coin stores which have unsorted bins of non-silver foreign coins for 10 or 25 cents. Not reading Arabic, I wasn't sure I would ever be able to ID it. It didn't look like an Ottoman Empire coin, and didn't have any of the symbols I usually associate with Saudi Arabia, Iran or Egypt. On a hunch, I looked up pre-unified Saudi Arabia in my old Krause guide and stumbled across what I believe to be it. Looks like a AH 1344=1926 1 Ghirsh coin from the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd. Looks like they only made it for one year. Not a bad find for 25 cents or so...

On a side note, I'm trying to get better at macro photography for stuff like coins. That "fancy" black background is actually a piano bench. No flash, no zoom, close as it can focus on a textured black background in macro mode on my cheap digital camera actually turned out surprisingly well this time.

Soap.JPG, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

Christine was promised a reward from Daiso (sort of a Japanese dollar fifty store) if she could overcome her stage fright and do her violin recital. Here she is very proud of the reward she picked out. $1.62 well spent?

Phone, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

For Michelle's Chinese homework packet this week, she has a sheet where she has to fill in the second half of a word phonetically based on a picture. She had a little trouble with the phone. "Michelle, what word comes after 電?"
Michelle: "Um, 腦?" (電腦 = computer)
To be fair, the picture is of an old rotary phone, which she has probably never seen...

Separated at Birth, a photo by kienlung on Flickr.

Creepy Microsoft Cloud billboard on 101N versus Yog-Sothoth. Coincidence?