A Penny for Your Thoughts

According to Straight Dope, the phrase “a penny for your thoughts” was included in the The Proverbs Of John Heywood in 1546. Probably a penny had some worth then. It certainly doesn't now. In many of the countries we've visited ... New Zealand, Australia and Canada come to mind immediately … they've phased out pennies altogether. They round off everything to the nearest 5 or 10 cents. No such thing as $9.99 … it's always $10, no matter what the sign says.

Yet returning to the USA, we find pennies, made of zinc now and not copper, still in use, though their value is nearly worthless. A penny's worth of penny candy will probably get you the cellophane wrapper and Ebay has penny whistles going for $5.65 plus shipping.

They've made several attempts to rid us of pennies, but evidently the zinc lobby (yes, I'm serious) is very opposed to it. The cost of production is more to make them than they're worth. I read that it costs ~2.2 cents to make a penny. I was never a math whiz, but even I can figure out that this is probably not a good business model. Do we really lose that much money making money? Considering the US mints billions of pennies each year, it would seem we could save a bit on materials, labor and overhead if we eliminated this product. Of course, that's just me, but I've noted we have a significant budget deficit and maybe this would help a little.

That said, when I see a penny laying on the ground, I still never hesitate to stop and pick it up … if it's heads up that is...

Find a penny, pick it up. All day long you'll have good luck.

Penny tails, flip again. Share your luck with a friend.

You just never know when you'll find a penny worth something … even my thoughts.

So...do you still pick up good luck pennies?

Days and Ways to Celebrate

A daily list of mostly obscure holidays and fun ways to celebrate them.

Ex-Spouse Day

Nah...let's not go there!

National Pecan Day

Instead of ex-spouses, let's celebrate pecans. Bake a pecan pie...you can't do that with an ex-spouse!

Jump Trax

 

My 18-year-old nephew known as Nicholas or Nick to the rest of the world and Nicks to me, works part time at a place called Jump Trax. He's worked there for two years and though I've visited during that time, I never had a chance to see the inside of the place. In fact, I didn't really know what the place was. It's an inflatable jumping place. Hmm...

So I'm back in the Boston area unexpectedly and we were planning to drop Nicks off at work one day and I asked if we could have a tour. “Sure”, he said. Remember, he's 18 and I'm his aging aunt. Saying “Sure” was very large in my book and I was looking forward to seeing what a jumping place was. I mean I know what “jumping” is, but an inflatable jumping place, that's something different from a place that's jumpin' or getting jumped.

Son of a gun, if Jump Trax isn't a place where kids go to jump. It's a village of huge, soft, inflatable creatures and structures. You take off your shoes and dive in … and jump. You can have jumping parties or open jump time if nothing else is scheduled. You can enjoy it if you're 6, 16 or 60 although I was not invited to jump... not everything was totally inflated yet. Maybe next time.

I'm not sure I CAN jump, now that I think of it. I know I could jump once, but I don't do it often any more. I jump off the boat (actually a graceful step-down is more accurate) and I “jump to” when the captain gives a command (as if!). If I get a special invitation, I jump on it. And when we don't get to port on time or the weather's lousy, I get jumpy. I need to ask Nicks if I can jump at Jump Trax. It sounds as if it could be another adventure.

Days and Ways to Celebrate

A daily list of mostly obscure holidays and fun ways to celebrate them.

April Fool's Day

The reference to this day dates back to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 14th century. It's celebrated in many countries by sticking a paper fish to someone's back without them knowing it, a tradition known in France as poisson d'avril, literally April Fish. Go ahead, do it, fool someone!

Sliced Bread Day

First time sliced bread appeared commercially (Holsum Bread), followed by Wonder Bread (1930). It was advertised as "the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped" which led to the expression "the greatest thing since sliced bread". And now you know the rest of the story.

A to B Update: Blizzard!!!

Whose woods these are, I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – Robert Frost

It's one thing to return to Boston and another to return in winter in time for a huge blizzard. They call this type of storm a nor'easter. I haven't experienced snow and bone-chilling cold for a long, long time. Somehow, I'm just not appreciating it the way I should.  I've had brief moments of nostalgia as I caught snowflakes on my tongue and thought about all the forts and snowmen I built as a kid. The fond memories dissipated quickly when I was brushing off the car and copious amount of the freezing white stuff filled up my borrowed boots.

I'd always heard that the native Inuit people of the Arctic region have ~400 words for snow. In actuality, that's an urban myth, there's less, but still they know their snow. They have closer to 50 maybe … about as many as I have. There's powder, wet snow, heavy snow, damned snow, I'm sick of snow. I could go on, but you get the gist. This snow, by the way, was heavy, wet and sticky … snowball snow.

It started snowing about three days ago. At times, visibility was 0 and it snowed horizontally, thanks to the wind. The weather forecast called for 4-8” and was revised several times as the 8”, then 12”, then 15” marks were met and exceeded. It looks like about 20” total fell and it's a proverbial winter wonderland out there. Along the seacoast, exceptionally high tides and winds swept away a home which had been sitting precariously on an eroded cliff … just snatched it up and sucked it away. There was lots of coastal flooding and beach erosion. Here, a bit more inland, there are lots of broken branches and downed trees and deep, heavy snow.

I do remember the quiet, muffled sounds in a post-snowstorm neighborhood, the snow insulating us from noise. No traffic on the unplowed roads; just the occasional sound of someone shoveling in the distance. The quiet was palpable. Despite the dark gray skies, the brightness of the reflected snow hurt my eyes. All that white. The evergreen boughs bent way over, straining with their load. Icicles dangled from the eaves and tiny branches. It's that way here at the moment.

I had to memorize Robert Frost's poem as a child. For all my complaining, I did watch my sister's woods fill up with snow. It was beautiful.

As an aside, David is working and sweltering in Adelaide. We'd like to exchange a little of his Adelaide heat for some of my Boston cold, but we haven't figured out quite how.

Days and Ways to Celebrate

A daily list of mostly obscure holidays and fun ways to celebrate them.

Save a Spider Day

Fat Chance!

Pi Day

A day to celebrate that mathematical constant (π) and its never ending value 3.14159... It's also Albert Einstein's birthday (1879). Makes you want to calculate the area of a circle, huh?