Friday, October 10, 2008

3,000 Coins in a Fountain

Last night Meg and I tried something new with Henry. We took him to a nearby park. There we hung out in the playground for a little bit, not too long as it was buggy. Henry seemed to like both the swing and the slide. As always he also enjoyed staring at the other people, especially the children.

After he went to bed and this morning during my commute I looked at some coin, a whole lot of hand rolled stuff.

200 small dollars, seven half dollars, and 1,200 quarters turned up just four Canadian quarters and one Canadian Loonie.

I fared better with the dimes. 3,150 dimes yielded three silver Rosies (1946, 1954D, 1964D), eight Canadians, four Bermuda 10¢, one UK penny, one US penny, one Trindad and Tobago 10¢, and one East Carribean States 10¢.

The nickels weren't too bad either. I searched 1,920 of them and found two War Times (2 x 1943P) and eleven Canadians (6 Ni). I've now found four 1943P's this week.

The pennies were pretty good, but boy were they messy and gross. About 3,000 of the 9,900 coins I searched must have spent a long time submerged. Perhaps they were from a fountain? They were very corroded. In them I found forty-two Wheats, sixty Canadians, eighteen US dimes, one UK penny, and one Euro 5¢ (Spain). The Wheats were:

1916, 1935, 1936, 1940, 1944(2), 1944D, 1944S, 1947(2), 1948(3), 1950, 1950D, 1951, 1951D(2), 1952D, 1953(2), 1954D, 1955(4), 1955D, 1956(2), 1956D(3), 1957, 1957D(5), 1958(2), 1958D



Yesterday morning I also finished a book I was reading, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief, by Ben Macintyre. It is about a Victorian criminal. The subject matter isn't something I usually spend time with, but I liked another book I read by the same author and it is my favorite time period to read about (at least lately). I enjoyed this read like his other book. This book is about Adam Worth, a successful career criminal. He grew up in the United States, but after a large Boston bank robbery he fled to England and took on a new alias. In England his power grew and he eventually became accepted by high society, even though he was secretly still orchestrating many elaborate bank robberies and forgery scams. The book follows his career and that of many personalities who he crossed paths with or influenced. It concentrated heavily on his theft of Thomas Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire. Worth kept the painting for almost twenty-five years, even through a prison sentence. At times, Macintyre got a bit too philosophical for me about Worth's "relationship" with the painting, but that's my only complaint about the book. Otherwise the book was quite fascinating and seemed to be well researched.



Found: 1 quarter (at Hannaford's)

2 comments:

James (UK) said...

Despite everything the media says, kids still love the "manual" toys, like swings and slides. ;-)

Book sounds good. I know on our versions of the "Discovery" channels, and National Geographic we have tonnes of crime shows in a similar vein... might be worth looking your channels up to see if there's anything similar?

kestrelia said...

I haven't gotten into those, but I haven't spent much time watching documentaries lately, either. We don't have that much time for TV these days and when we do watch TV I like to watch things we both can enjoy - plus I've found I get so much more out of books.