Money Money Money

What can I say about money? Well, I suppose I can say quite a lot. I could complain about spending money, I could complain about low wages, I could talk about how great it is that we don't pay sales tax in Montana, or I could do some more complaining about the cost of car insurance here...

BUT, I'm not going to talk about any of that. I am going to talk about finding money! I have always stopped to pick up pennies on the ground, next to the curb, in the parking lot... It's just something I do. Since high school I started keeping track of how much money I have found, and it is amazing how much money is out there! I hesitate to even blog this information because I don't want others to be picking up my fortune!

Back in high school I kept a monthly collection of random coins I would find. In October of 1999 I found nearly $3.00 just around the high school in change! At the time I thought I was making pretty good money.

I dated a girl in high school and into college, we dated for three years, and after a year we kept a 'pot' of found money. It all started out when we were out for a walk and found an intersection with pennies scattered everywhere. I don't know what the story was with all those pennies, but we picked them up and came up with the idea of keeping them in a jar and see how much we could find. When we broke up two years later, we decided to split the money and we both came away with $20, all from found money!

Since 2005, Laura and I have been keeping a similar jar of found money. When I was in college I took a pottery class and sculpted a pot on the wheel to keep some found money in. Since January of 2005 we have been adding money almost every week. Every Sunday evening we add the money we found during the week to the pot and add up our total findings. When we moved to Missoula in August 2005 we had about $15 in found money already in the pot. In October, while out for a bike ride, Laura rode past a $20 bill in the street and I stopped to pick it up. I gave her a hard time about missing the money, but yesterday she got me back...

While we were out for a walk up the mountain, we did our usual climb to the top and back down. Since temperatures were in the low 40's we decided another mile wouldn't hurt, so we continued on a longer route. A little over half a mile later I spotted a few things on the ground in front of us and started glancing around to see what everything was. I passed right over the $20 and my eye caught a crushed aluminum can. Laura bent down to pick up the bill and looked at me with a big smile on her face. I had already taken a step past the bill and nearly stopped dead in my tracks when I noticed the $20 in her hand! How did I miss that? So, when we add the #20 into the pot on Sunday night, we will have over $75 in found money - granted that $40 of that is in paper money we have found, but that also means that over $35 is in coins we have found.

My Junior and Senior year in college were some of the best times for finding money. When we would have easy days at practice we would usually have 5-8 miles of running to do, so we would run side streets to find money, we called them a "Money Run." We would keep track of which streets we had ran on in the past few weeks and try to pick out new streets to see what money might be laying in the street. The distance runners thought it was kind of weird and funny, but by the time I graduated, everyone was looking for the money when we were running - which then resulted in me finding less money! See why I don't want everyone to know this secret!? Ha ha!

This weekend we don't have much going on. We might find a few geocaches, but that is all we have thought about doing. There is talk of playing some BINGO tonight with some friends, so who knows what kinds of fun we will have. Until again

-=Nolan=-