New Dollar Coins

Yesterday as I was heading out to lunch a fellow coworker stopped me to say "Hello". He noticed I had a small handful of the new Presidential Golden Dollars in my hand, which I was going to use to pay for lunch. He hadn't seen them yet, so I showed him the coins. If you haven't gotten one of these new dollar coins, you should stop to your local evil bank and ask for them. The government is going to mint four different $1 coins each year for the next 11+ years. Each coin will have a different president on the front, called the "obverse", of the coin, and all of them will have the Statue of Liberty on the back, or the "reverse". They are a golden color, and even though they aren't real gold, they are cool to look at. This year they have already released coins with George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Anyway, back to the story... We started to talk about the minting errors he had heard about the new $1 coins. As with all coins there are tons of errors (remember it's the government who makes them) to discuss, but he focused on the new edge lettering. On the edge of these new coins the mint inscribed the words: "In God We Trust", "E Plurbis Unum", and the year of the coin's mintage ("2007"), and the mint mark (usually a "P" or a "D"). They did this to give more room for the presidential portrait, and to make the coin more unique.

One of the most well known errors on the coins is the missing wording on the edge of the coin. At first some people who got the coins thought this was intentional to remove the "In God We Trust" from the coins with all of the political "hay" about religion and government, but this isn't the case. Instead it was a minting error that created some coins without the writing, and they are now being called "Godless coins". Some of the Washington "Godless" coins have sold on eBay for $600, but most sell for around $40-50. The Adams "Godless" coins are rarer and are commanding an higher price. Of course there are a few people trying to cash in on this error by filing off the edge writing and trying to sell the fake "Godless" coins as authentic errors. My friend said that he heard of another error related to the edge writing. He said that the mint intended for the writing to be read correctly when the coin was face up, but some of the coins have the writing face down. I hadn't heard that, and I thought he was pulling my leg, so I kinda dismissed him with a wave, and went off to lunch. Well today, pulled out a handful of my $1 presidential coins and I looked at the edge writing. Of the 20 coins I examined, 8 of them had the writing face up, and 12 had the writing face down. If it's an error, I have a whole bunch of them! Which of course makes it unlikely that the error is worth anything. I did a quick Internet search and found that it is in fact not an error! The mint never intended to control the direction of the edge text. The machine they use to inscribe the edge does not check the direction of the coin before it inscribes, so there is roughly a 50/50 chance of the text being face up or face down.

So if someone stops you on the way to lunch and tries to tell you that $1 coin with the text the "opposite" way is worth money, don't be fooled and wave him (or her) off and continue on to lunch. Later Lou

Lunch

I am sitting in one of my local lunch hangouts, a place my co-workers and I refer to as the "$2 pizza place", but it is actually called "Adrian's Pizza". They have a lunch special for $1.99 where you get a small (personal sized) cheese pizza and a drink. The pizza is actually pretty big, yummy, and it is paired up with a free refill drink. All together it makes a great lunch. The $2 pizza isn't the only lunch special, and it's not the only good, inexpensive food either. I usually get the Italian Hoagie lunch special: a good sized Italian sandwich with a large order of fresh fries, and a free refill drink, all together for under $5. Who says you have to carrt in a lunch to eat inexpensively? However, eating healthy is a whole different issue!

Last night (Thursday) our bowling team lost big time... I mean really big time. We didn't win a single game, and lost all 7 points. No oppurtunity for optimism there, except that next week we bowl a pretty weak team, unlike the team we bowled last night... To be honest, the team we bowled against wasn't really the problem, rather we just really didn't bowl well last night. I once again bowled under my average, and I believe most (if not all) of my team mates bowled under their averages as well... I think we need to start practicing, get professional training, or maybe we should wish upon a star?

Wednesday night I finally gave in on one of my new year's resolutions: No carbonated drinks. I had run out of bottled water at home, and I didn't feel like making iced tea. Sitting in the fridge was a few remaining cans of root beer that "Two" had asked me to get for him. I was at home alone, and still feeling a little down about "Sweetie" telling me she was "moving on", so I fell off the wagon and had the beer... the root beer. But I didn't stop with just one... I had two, and after last night's loss, I had another... I think I am becoming a root beer aholoic! :-)

It's time to go back to work, yeah... I went back to work yesterday, after my two day mental health break. I have talked briefly to "Sweetie", but there isn't anything positive to report on that front... (sigh)...

Later Lou

PB&J

I made a Peanut Butter and Jelly (PB&J) sandwich last night as a snack before bed, and as I was making it, I thought about the effort I was going through to do it. First I got out a paper plate to build the sandwich on, and then eat from. Then I got out two slices of bread, the peanut butter, the jelly, a knife and a spoon... I like my sandwiches toasted, so I put the slices of bread in the toaster and then opened the PB and J, placed the knife on top of the PB jar. I opened the grape jelly and put the spoon on the upside down lid on the counter. When the toast popped, I took the first slice out, and coated it evenly with peanut butter, and put the excess from the knife back into the jar. Then I got the second slice from the toaster, and plopped a spoonful of jelly on the slice and spread it with the back of the spoon. Then I put the two slices together, put everything away, got a napkin and a drink and started chowing down. As I was doing all of that I realized that making a PB&J sandwich, which is really easy, has to be done a certain way. I thought about why I did the peanut butter first? Why didn't I put both the PB and J on the same slice when I was making it? Why did I use both a knife and a spoon? Why make this simple task so complicated? Well then I wondered... Am I the only one that makes it this way? How do other people make their PB&J sandwiches? Do they just slop it all together, or do they do it a special way? Do you put the peanut butter or jelly on first? Do you toast it? Do you mix the two on the same slice? Do you use only one slice of bread and fold it over? Do you like a special bread for PB&J? What about the jelly? Do you use jam or marmalade? Do you use a knife, fork, spoon, fingers or some combination to make the sandwich? The Smucker's company that makes Jelly and Jam is fighting a legal battle to "patent" a special technique to make a PB&J so the jelly doesn't soak the bread. These must be very important questions, and I want to know what is the best way, no, the perfect way to make a PB&J?

Package in car?

Well, I am guilty... Full of guilt for not posting anything here since April. Well actually I am not feeling really guilty. If someone was actually reading this, and expecting there to be something here THEN I would feel guilty! I am sitting in CiCi's Pizza in Cranberry Twp., PA writing this entry to the ramblings. I am wishing I had something exciting and witty to write, but alas, I am wit-less... So why are you still reading? I just watched the most boring news cast of my life. There was a bomb scare in Washington, DC and they were showing live video of the car where the bomb was supposed to be... Waiting... Waiting for something to happen... Watching the waiting with nothing happening was just about as exciting as brushing my teeth in the morning, without the plaque... Well it was successfully "disrupted", thankfully... It was so boring that I looked away at the wrong time and missed the "disruption" which was a small explosion that popped the door off the car... When I looked back the car looked the same except that a blanket was over the car now... I didn't realize I had missed anything... I suppose the whole thing would have been more interesting with sound... Anyway, why the TV thought it would be exciting to show an unmoving car sitting there doing nothing for almost my entire lunch hour, is beyond me. Why not just tell us it was a probably a bomb, show us something else until something "interesting" happens with the bomb... BTW: "Interesting" when talking about a bomb is defined as "bomb explodes" or "bomb is successfully disarmed, but the technician grew a few new gray hairs". Then show us the highlights over and over again... Until we have the images burned into the retina's of our eyes... Well it's over... Glad it came out ok, meaning no one hurt. I haven't heard yet whether the suspicious package was actually a bomb yet... For all I know it might have just been someone's dirty laundry left in the car too long and starting to develop its own self-awareness. Now that would have been news! While the package in the car was being taken care of the scroll on the bottom of the screen described a story about a parking ticket placed on a car with a dead guy inside... (Yeah that was more exciting than watching the car just sit there...) Apparently the guy wasn't discovered to be dead until 2 days after the ticket was placed on the car, and the guy had been missing for 9 days. You think there would have been some distinctive clues that the guy was dead... You know like not breathing, and fogging up the windows! :-) Or that he hadn't moved in almost a week. Maybe they just thought he was a pile of dirty laundry. Well it's time to go back to work. I better put a reminder in my PDA to clean out my car when I get home from work tonight. Later Lou