I find myself trying to take a minute to focus on something positive as its looking like Laura is coming for us - as if the year of the ‘Rona wasn’t bad enough without a Cat 3 or 4 Hurricane to spice things up. I always hate the lead-up to a storm. The stress and worry tie your stomach up in knots. Anyway…
In early November of last year, I went to Canada for a few days on a job. These trips are not usually all that fun - I usually plan them so I get in, do the job, and get back home without a lot of sight-seeing. I usually just go to the Hotel and the Job site. I often think it would be fun to get to go to a bank and get some local coins and currency, but it usually just is not in the cards.
I try to get my steps / miles in every day to get my exercise though and, on this trip, I took a walk around the area surrounding the hotel. On this walk I found a quarter. It was a Canadian quarter with Alberta featured on the back. I never got around to posting about this but finding this quarter was interesting and fun for a few reasons:
1) I was in Alberta at the time of finding it.
2) The back of the coin featured / referenced the oil and gas industry and oil production. Alberta is the center of the oil and gas industry in Canada, I work in Oil and Gas, and I was actually there visiting a field with a large number of collection points and decentralized processing facilities that was in a remote area.
The quarter celebrates the 2005 centennial of Alberta, and 2005 also happens to be the year I graduated high school - and happens to be the year PMG was founded and started grading notes, so bonus points there.
Prior to finding this I had not realized that Canada had their own statehood quarter program / were featuring states / provinces on their quarters like the US has been (for about 20 years now).
It is not super-pretty, especially on the obverse - it IS a parking lot find, after all.
So, in a way, it was a perfect token / memento from the trip, and I bought it home with me - along with a snow globe, which Ben smashed within 24 hours. It has spent most of the last year on my dresser and I see it from time to time.
I was supposed to return to the area two more times for follow up projects in the 1st and 3rd quarters of this year but the outbreak of the pandemic and the crash in oil projects get a lot of projects postponed - both to limit visitors to the sites and to keep spending down. It's funny sometimes to think about how different this year has been from how it "was supposed to be."
One thing I will say for Hurricanes - I think I’ve made more progress on cleaning up in the garage in the last 36 hours than in the last 2 years as we try to get to be able to bring both cars into the protective envelope of the house.
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