Coins & Family Fun I took the coinage I'd saved over the last 17 years or so down to the
Coinstar machine at the local grocery store. While I'm not wild about
paying just under 9% in order to convert the coins to cash, I was even
less wild about the prospect of hand-rolling all of that change. It's
too bad that the banks and credit unions around here don't have those
big change sorters like they used to, as then I could've paid a 0% fee,
which would've been sweet. I netted a little over $333.00, only a small
percentage of which was in the quarter denomination, and no higher
denominations, so you can picture how much coinage that was. I'd
estimate that my coin jar (an old glass 5 gallon water bottle) weighed
between 50-75 pounds. It was fun to lug around. It took about 25 minutes
for the Coinstar machine to process all of the coins.

While it's nice to have the cash, the lesson I learned from this is to
try and accrue as few coins as possible. It was good to have over $300
in coins which could be converted to paper money fairly quickly, but I
took a bath on it all the same. There was the 9% fee, and the lack of
interest I made on the money, which would probably have been less than
inflation if the money had been added to a regular savings account over
the last 17 years, but it would have at least lessened the effect.

For dinner we took the girls to McDonald's, because they have one of
those giant Habitrail things, which the girls love. Even our
not-quite-two-year-old climbs around in it. Which brings me to the
Moment Of Cuteness. She came out the entrance of the Habitrail, and ran
over to us with her arms above her head, yelling, "I'm happy, I'm
happy". Unfortunately, the E.P.A., who happened also to be in the
restaurant doing an environmental study, kicked us out because we had
saturated their sensitive equipment with 5000 /times/ the permitted
level of Free Cuteness and Parental Goop molecules. Gummint bastards.  ¶ 18:23