There are days when I really wish this was still the summer of 2006 and I could spend an entire week searching rolls of pennies looking for things to put in my Whitman folders or looking through rolls of dimes and quarters looking to see if there might be any old silver ones in there like I see other people talking about on Facebook and Reddit. There are times lately when I wish I had the chance to try to beat the personal record I set for myself when I made a 19.5 inch tall column of pennies that contained about $122 in pennies and weighed more than my 4 year old currently does.

Even before this, as I think I've mentioned, it's been on my agenda / wishlist to go back and update those old coin albums with coins from the last 10-15 years, but I just don't have time to do it the way I want to - by hitting the bank and pulling the coins from circulation, just like I filled them in the first place.

But you can’t do that when you have kids in the house that would try to eat said pennies and dimes.

As if to underline this, Sam found a dead bug in the corner the other day and was sticking it in his mouth. Kids, right? Finds a dead bug and tries to eat it. Yuck.

… and one thing you have to acknowledge for pennies is that they are dirty. It has been 15 years and I still remember having black fingertips after handling / searching through pennies for a few hours… and they stink. Something about pennies / copper - they just flat our stink in a way that copper-nickel clads and silver coinage doesn’t. Fortunately I don’t have much of a sense of smell (I can barely smell spoiled milk) but my family insists that the smell that comes off 100 pounds of old pennies is quite unpleasant.