Keep the Change

(Soundtrack currently playing - Mamma Mia - ABBA "Money, Money, Money")

Happy President's Day + Mamma Mia = a pretty gay blog post about money.

In that earlier effort to clean out my place for other things, I came across my ongoing bundle of coins that I have been collecting. Whenever I have change in my pockets or find some somewhere I go ahead and drop it off in one of my piggy banks. I started separating them by coin price into separate containers.

I'm amazed by the American culture. In other parts of the world, coins still act as a major currency. I mean you could go to parts of europe and pay for a whole meal with just coins. If you go to asia, you could buy clothes with coins. In Los Angeles, we throw coins into fountains.

Do you remember being a kid and looking through your house for nickels, dimes and quarters, all in the hopes of gathering enough to buy yourself something from the ice cream truck or the supermarket? Do you remember when $0.50 stood for a pack of Big League Chew? Two packs of Bubble Gum Cigarrettes? two arcade games? a giant ice push up?

And the best part of it all was that for that half hour or more, you had something that was so pleasurable and cool that you didn't care about anything else in the world except enjoying those few moments of fun and freedom?

Well, as I am cleaning my room, I went ahead and started bundling my collected change into those paper bundles. Once all was said and done I ended up with $170+ of change.

WOW!

Who would have thought that a year or so of just taking care of the little pieces of change could amount to so much?

Anyways, I was pretty excited to say the least to find out out of that mess I found some buried treasure.

Now only if the banks were open today I could have put them into my savings.