Ever since I was little, my dad has collected pennies. Leftover pennies in pocket change, pennies that various relatives saved up for him, because, lol, saving pennies! For someone! My brother and I would give him our pennies when we were kids to get sweet sweet quarters instead.
The pennies are in the glass jars that he bought for a beer making escapade that happened, as far as I know, once. The beer was terrible and the jars became giant penny jars. I'd say the jars are entirely pennies, but there are a few non-penny coins in there and possibly some small non-coin objects that would fit in the neck of the jar. These are the hazards of having something like a penny collection in a house with small children.
However, my parents are getting ready to move and are going through the various objects that you accumulate over decades of living in the same house (I did that once! There was a time when I lived more than 3 years in one place!?) and it sounds like the penny jars aren't going to make the move. The problem, of course, is that my dad estimates there's probably more $1300 in pennies... about 2700 rolls worth.
It's not surprising, I mean, they're heavy as fuck and my parents are doing the, "We're old and the children moved out a million years ago, and this house is big enough that cleaning it is a pain in the ass so we're going to downsize and move closer to the extended family while we're at it," thing. So if you're downsizing why WOULD you keep the penny jars?
But at the same time, it feels weird to me that the penny jars will go away after decades of penny collection. It's one of those weird quirks that I thought would last forever, for some reason. I just assumed when my parents were super old that there'd still be a penny jar crushing the carpet in a corner of the living room. Nope!
Meanwhile, on the other coast of the US, the room I live in is literally 8 by 8 feet. I know because I measured it when we moved in to figure out how much furniture I could fit in here. The answer is: one large bookcase, a giant armoire thingie that doubles as more shelves and a dresser, a bed, a bedside table, a 3-shelf wire-thingie from IKEA that is full of art supplies and literally the smallest desk I could find. I'm telling this so you understand that it doesn't take much for my distracted as fuck brain to end up with more stuff than I know what to do with in here, and it frequently gets piled haphazardly on the floor. Especially since I, like so many people who pretend they're going to start writing longhand again, hoard notebooks and lined paper.
I'd been increasingly overwhelmed with the notebooks, because I probably needed to sort them, and decide if I still wanted them, and which ones I wanted, and etc etc etc. It's hard because you never know when you're going to need precisely that notebook that you bought 13 years ago on sale at an Office Max with your employee discount, right? And every time I looked at the piles of notebooks, I just shuffled them over, put them in a box, ignored them... anything but Make Decisions.
Well.
My older dog, Rey, is sick (she should be okay, but fingers crossed). She reacted to the medication the way that I was told she would - by drinking all the water she could find... and then she came in, gave me a tired little tail wag, a quiet whine, and vomited all over my floor. And everything on the floor. Copious amounts of watery yellow puke on everything, soaking into the papers, creating a horrible yellow slurry of doom.
So after the initial worried call back to the vet (side effect of her medication being on an empty stomach because she hadn't felt like eating, not particularly worrisome on its own) I did the only thing I could do, which was to put on gloves and chuck everything the barf touched into the trash kingdom.
Notebooks that I'd been holding off on chucking or using for years, decades. Books that contained the very beginnings of previous, failed Bullet Journal attempts. Scratch paper for math practice. Printed copies of scientific papers that I've totes read.... yes. Gone, gone, gone, toss it, ew, gross, toss.
And it's fine. Well, not Rey being sick, that sucks. But the lost notebooks. Because the thing is? I'm... not entirely sure I could tell you which all notebooks got tossed unless I went and dug through the trash bags, which I'm definitely not going to do. I should probably have tossed it all before.
So, if you're having trouble making a decision, just wait until someone vomits all over it and then yeet everything into the sun.
The pennies are in the glass jars that he bought for a beer making escapade that happened, as far as I know, once. The beer was terrible and the jars became giant penny jars. I'd say the jars are entirely pennies, but there are a few non-penny coins in there and possibly some small non-coin objects that would fit in the neck of the jar. These are the hazards of having something like a penny collection in a house with small children.
However, my parents are getting ready to move and are going through the various objects that you accumulate over decades of living in the same house (I did that once! There was a time when I lived more than 3 years in one place!?) and it sounds like the penny jars aren't going to make the move. The problem, of course, is that my dad estimates there's probably more $1300 in pennies... about 2700 rolls worth.
It's not surprising, I mean, they're heavy as fuck and my parents are doing the, "We're old and the children moved out a million years ago, and this house is big enough that cleaning it is a pain in the ass so we're going to downsize and move closer to the extended family while we're at it," thing. So if you're downsizing why WOULD you keep the penny jars?
But at the same time, it feels weird to me that the penny jars will go away after decades of penny collection. It's one of those weird quirks that I thought would last forever, for some reason. I just assumed when my parents were super old that there'd still be a penny jar crushing the carpet in a corner of the living room. Nope!
Meanwhile, on the other coast of the US, the room I live in is literally 8 by 8 feet. I know because I measured it when we moved in to figure out how much furniture I could fit in here. The answer is: one large bookcase, a giant armoire thingie that doubles as more shelves and a dresser, a bed, a bedside table, a 3-shelf wire-thingie from IKEA that is full of art supplies and literally the smallest desk I could find. I'm telling this so you understand that it doesn't take much for my distracted as fuck brain to end up with more stuff than I know what to do with in here, and it frequently gets piled haphazardly on the floor. Especially since I, like so many people who pretend they're going to start writing longhand again, hoard notebooks and lined paper.
I'd been increasingly overwhelmed with the notebooks, because I probably needed to sort them, and decide if I still wanted them, and which ones I wanted, and etc etc etc. It's hard because you never know when you're going to need precisely that notebook that you bought 13 years ago on sale at an Office Max with your employee discount, right? And every time I looked at the piles of notebooks, I just shuffled them over, put them in a box, ignored them... anything but Make Decisions.
Well.
My older dog, Rey, is sick (she should be okay, but fingers crossed). She reacted to the medication the way that I was told she would - by drinking all the water she could find... and then she came in, gave me a tired little tail wag, a quiet whine, and vomited all over my floor. And everything on the floor. Copious amounts of watery yellow puke on everything, soaking into the papers, creating a horrible yellow slurry of doom.
So after the initial worried call back to the vet (side effect of her medication being on an empty stomach because she hadn't felt like eating, not particularly worrisome on its own) I did the only thing I could do, which was to put on gloves and chuck everything the barf touched into the trash kingdom.
Notebooks that I'd been holding off on chucking or using for years, decades. Books that contained the very beginnings of previous, failed Bullet Journal attempts. Scratch paper for math practice. Printed copies of scientific papers that I've totes read.... yes. Gone, gone, gone, toss it, ew, gross, toss.
And it's fine. Well, not Rey being sick, that sucks. But the lost notebooks. Because the thing is? I'm... not entirely sure I could tell you which all notebooks got tossed unless I went and dug through the trash bags, which I'm definitely not going to do. I should probably have tossed it all before.
So, if you're having trouble making a decision, just wait until someone vomits all over it and then yeet everything into the sun.