How did your day start?

Some days start out in a peculiar fashion. Today is one of them.

I am scheduled to go to the World Money Fair in Berlin tomorrow, but an approaching snow storm looks like it will hit just before my plane is due to take off.

Now I am worried about whether I should try to make some changes to my schedule at this late hour or just take whatever consequences come my way with the present schedule.

This is distracting me from my usual work as you might guess. I have much to do today to be ready to depart.

So what do you think my first phone call was this morning?

I was waiting for my computer to fire up after signing on when a caller told me he had an inquiry about an ad.

I asked him the issue date. I asked him the page number. I took a look to see what I could see. We ended up in the classified section.

His first question was what did “postpaid” mean.

I happily told him it meant the seller paid the postage.

The second question was whether I could give him a phone number of the advertiser.

I cannot.

The beauty of classified ads that are entered online is that the person taking out the ad says just what he wants to. There is no way I can obtain a telephone number.

The caller was a little disappointed, but he cheerfully thanked me for talking to him.

What does this mean as a start to my day?

I checked email to see whether there were some interesting inquiries.

One of them had images of a 1965 quarter. It looks every bit as worn as any clad quarter can after 50 years of use.

The question centered on the reverse.

Naturally, that was the blurry image.

There was something across the lower left quadrant that could be a gash, or it could be a raised line.

What did I do? Well, I sent it to error authority Ken Potter to figure out. On a day like today, I am just not focused on such tasks.

Ken will either identify it, request new images or tell the sender to have a dealer take a look at it.

This start to my day also diverted me from the one thing I knew I needed to do this morning.

I checked silver bullion American Eagle sales figures.

Did the Mint sell out of all 6 million coins it had available in January?

According to the Mint website, the answer is no.

The January monthly sales total stands at 5,954,500.

What does that mean?

The Mint rations supply to assure equitable distribution according to its formula, but not all coins were taken.

Is the market losing its appetite for silver Eagles?

Is that a question you want me to address when I am offering definitions of what “postpaid” means?

I think not.

We’ll leave that to another day.

In any case, as a result, the Mint has 45,500 leftover coins to add to the million silver American Eagle bullion coins available this week.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper has twice won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."

• Like this article? Read more by subscribing to Numismatic News