I am Karan from Olympia, WA.
Almost every other name used here is a pseodonym pseudonim pseudonymn alias.
The rest of it is true - mostly - and all of it is my own.
Don't even think about taking any of it, unless of course, you want to pay me.
Random Wisdom: Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window - Steve Wozniak
The counter says that 2846336 have been flummelized, but I personally think it's all a big lie.
In his first quest toward becoming a serious collector of something, my friend Jack decided to collect quarters. Specifically, he collected bags of quarters from the 50 State Quarters Program, $25 bags of quarters from both mints, Philadelphia and Denver.
That totals 100 bags of quarters. 100 heavy bags. Now he’s done and he’s a little bit paranoid that he’ll get robbed but the collection is so big and so heavy that he has to find a safe and reinforced place to stow them.
This is so not our problem. Our entire quarter effort was restricted to one of those cardboard US state maps where we shoved a quarter in each state. Even for us that became a chore and now that it’s full, we don’t know what to do with the thing. I’ll probably just give it to Jack and let him worry about it.
What I did offer to do was to help him catagorize his bags of quarters and at the time of my offer, I had no idea that it would be such a big deal. Jack kept most of his bags of quarters inside of the little white boxes they were shipped in and they were only labeled with the various US Mint codes for each of the bags. This means that even though we knew we had two bags for each state, we couldn’t tell which state or mint was contained in each box. Of course Jack didn’t keep the little shipping forms with the appropriate boxes. The forms are safely piled in a separate folder.
Apparently in the US Mint’s system of quarter bagging and organizing they assigned what seems to be a somewhat random series of numbers to each item. For example, the $25 bag of Alaska quarters from the Philadelphia mint is coded QT3 and the Denver mint bag is coded QO3. Washington’s bags are QR1 (P) and QS1 (D).
I think it’s safe to assume that the Q stands for quarters but as to the rest, I’m stumped. And to make it even more challenging, we were unable to find a list of what codes were assigned to what bags of quarters, not even on here on the world wide web.
Finally after tapping the wisdom of many EBay sellers, we were able to figure out the codes. It took a good chunk of the day. It was grueling and I am so glad I never grew up to be a librarian or a Walmart warehouse man.
Now the effort is complete and I am happy to announce my own personal contribution to the betterment of the Internets - with thanks for permission from Jack - I have converted the excel file we made in our organizing efforts and published it here as an ugly html page for the very first time!
I know! How public serverish of me! I’m like Vint Cerf himself!
If you measure civilization by the presence of a gas pump, my father-in-law lives very far away....no really....I’m guessing after driving down miles and miles of Sierra Nevada pine lined roadss and toward the great California/Nevada state line, you have probably traveled no less then 32 miles. OK...so maybe that’s twice the distance, I’m just saying...it’s a hella long drive from town.
The last time I was there and while sitting at his kitchen table wondering why is it that every time I sit alone in his house I hear a chainsaw or a leaf blower sound, the doorbell rang.
It startled me because of the before mentioned distance of that front door from the nearest gas pump plus the fact that in all the years I’ve been visiting there, I’ve never heard his doorbell before. Of course I answered it and there before my eyes was a pair of men sporting neckties in the 95 degree heat. This could only mean one thing and the magazine held out for me only confirmed my assumption.
These two men were crazy ass Jehovah Witnesses...crazy ass enough to drive way beyond the nearest neighbor hoping to save my lonely end of the road soul. Did they manage to do that? Nope. I saw their latest issue of Awake and before even one word was spoken, I said no thanks and closed the door.
I’ll leave it to you to decide if the mind blower was that they arrived at the door at all or that I was amazingly rude to not even offer them a cup of water.
Today I was reminded of a set of triplets I knew when I was just out of high school. They were identical and their names were...and I can’t believe their mom and dad did this to them....Peter, Paul and Murray.
It sounds kind of like a Saturday Night Live skit doesn’t it?
So, here, as promised is a new mind blower.
Are you sitting down?
When I was about twelve years old I was standing by myself at the bus stop...waiting for that big old yellow bus to roll up and haul my ass to school. To pass the time I was quietly singing ”Take a Letter Maria”. Before you go all ewwww on me...remember that I was 12 and it was something like 1968 and it was a big hit then...Top 10 and all that. I am a product of my generation.
Anyway, here comes the mind blowing part.
When the bus pulled up and the mustachioed Bus Driver Lady levered open the door, the bus music was also playing Take a Letter Maria and was at the exact same spot in the lyric I was! The exact same spot...exactly!
I know that just about now you feel the need to sit back and marvel at that ...so I’ll sign off...until the next MIND BLOWER!
In fact, it blew my mind so much that I think the only way to truly honor the fact is to create a whole new category in my web log called Mind Blowers.
Are you sitting down...ready to experience this one?
Back in the olden days when I still lived with my parents, our phone number was exactly the same as my aunt and uncle’s phone number....all except the area code. We lived in California, they lived in Nevada.
I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath.
Don’t worry, there will more Mind Blowers to shock and amaze you.
