A Disparaging Assessment of Lackadaisical Numismatics

Or, Coin Collecting Sucks!

Sarah and I moved in to our new house on Saturday. We are renting a house in Kensington, which is a lovely neighborhood on Adams Avenue in San Diego. We have two bedrooms, a giant kitchen, a jacuzzi bathtub, and a backyard (where Gus will play in less than two weeks). It is definitely a step up from apartment living.

Sarah and I have moved every year for the last four years. Sometimes the moves were short (changing apartments within the same complex) and sometimes the moves were long (1,276 miles to be exact), but every time we made the mistake of thinking we could move everything over a weekend. True, it is possible to move a one bedroom apartment in two days, but those are miserable days. This time we were smart about the move and arranged it so that our leases overlapped for the entire month of August, so we could move things over at our leisure. This was a great idea except for the part where I got my appendix out at the end of July and was not allowed to lift more than 10 pounds, so Sarah had to move almost everything. Another thing that we did not consider in this plan is the fact that once you have moved all your stuff to the new house, living in a largely unfurnished, decoration-free apartment is not pleasant. As a result, I have realized that, whether you have an hour or a year, moving is still a chore.

Now that everything is moved into the house and mostly set up (due to the diligent and tireless work of my wonderful wife) we are settling in to our new role as home dwellers. There are a lot of differences between living in an apartment and living in a house. One that I am quickly learning is that there are a lot more windows in a house than there are in an apartment, so I have to make sure the shades are down before I walk from the bathroom to the bedroom in just a towel (or less). Sarah is learning a lot about taking care of rose bushes. We are both getting used to the quirks associated with living in a house from the 1920s. The only real problem we are experiencing is a shortage of book storage space and it doesn’t help that Borders is having a store closing sale.

I love going-out-of-business sales, but I hate the people who shop at going-out-of-business sales. These people do not understand how the store closing sale works and they ruin it for true bargain hunters. Before the sale begins, the store marks everything up to MSRP, which means that Mastering the Art of French Cooking which was $40.00 last week is now $60.00. This is a smart move by Borders, because when they announce that cookbooks are 10% off, stupid people swoop in and buy Mastering the Art of French Cooking for the excellent deal of $54.00 (as a side note, Mastering the Art of French Cooking is currently $22.00 on Amazon.com). Anything that would be worth buying is usually gone before the sale reaches 15% (when Circuit City went under I witnessed people buying LCD TVs for a shocking 5% off MSRP, while the Best Buy across the street was selling the same TVs at a lower price everyday).

It is rare that I buy anything at going-out-of-business sales because, as noted above, I am too picky about the deal. Sarah usually has good luck finding novels and one time we found a National Parks travel guide for cheap. In fact, the only thing that I bought exclusively for myself, in a moment of weakness, was a Whitman Coin folder to collect the new National Parks series quarters that are being issued by the US Mint. “The Statehood quarters are so common nowadays, surely the National parks quarters will be too soon!” It has been a test in patience like I have never experienced before.

One of the many down-sides to apartment living is that it is hard to find a unit with a washer and dryer included. In our old apartment, we had a coin-operated laundry facility on our floor. Once a month I would go to the bank to get $20.00 in quarters for laundry and by the time I got those quarters back to the apartment I was brimming with anticipation - What quarters would we find this month? Sarah and I would promptly tear into the rolls (one each) and sort through the coins for any National Parks quarters we could find. In one year, or roughly 960 quarters, we found exactly one National Parks quarter... Yellowstone. It is not for a lack of trying, I asked the bank teller if they had the new quarters, I went to different banks to get the quarters, I made transactions in cash, I even looked up strategies on the internet. Coin collecting is a cruel mistress; she lures you in with the notion that cramming minted legal tender into a sheet of cardboard will somehow result in a greater sense of accomplishment, but instead of accomplishment all you experience 960 small failures.

The thing I am most excited about in the new house is the fact that we now have our own, in house, free washer and dryer and I will never have to get quarters from the bank again. I am going to put that Whitman National Parks Quarters coin folder on a shelf and not think about coin collecting again until we move out... which hopefully will not be next year.