Michelle and I had to make a late-night run to the pumpkin patch last night to pick up some pumpkins for the super-top-secret jack-o-lantern project (which I’m sure you’ll hear about soon if you haven’t already, as JesusH reanimates from its extended slumber), and we decided to hit Vons on the way and cash in the penny jar.

You see, the thing had finally gotten full enough that it was getting tough to add additional pennies, and it was becoming a bear to transport, as I was reminded of during our recent move. I used to be able to lift the thing fairly easily with one hand. By the time we cashed in, I didn’t dare even try that due to the significant risk of breakage or strained forearm.

A woman with money is a beautiful thing.

One of the interesting things about getting older is that I notice the amazing age of some of my stuff. Take the penny jar. This thing has been in my possession for almost half of my life… it’s the very jar I initially acquired to keep Marco the fish in, which you were caught up on earlier this year.

I’ve owned the jar for 15 years. I’ve owned the jar since George Bush Sr was President. Hell, it’s older than most of the trick-or-treaters that came by for candy tonight. (Oh, and a very Happy Halloween to you.)

Anyway, after the fish died, I used a punch to connect the air holes in the lid together to make a coin slot and started dropping my pennies in it, and that’s where most of my pennies have been going ever since. I was pretty careful to only drop pennies in the thing–the silver change all goes in the plaster pig bank from Tijuana, so I can’t be tempted to grab a handful and do something stupid with it. Not even in my most fiscally irresponsible times have I ever been tempted to bother taking a handful of pennies out of the pepper jar and blowing them on something (like I might have if I had quarters in there), so the buildup has been slow and steady over the years.

But all good things come to an end, and last night the CoinMaster at Vons got 15 minutes of good exercise processing this mass of copper. Now the mostly empty jar is back on the counter, ready to bulk up again over the next 15 years on a steady diet of the most useless coin in American circulation.

Misc notes on the process:

• I was indeed careful about not putting anything but pennies in the jar. Four dimes–otherwise, nothing but pennies.
• the machine rejected about 30 pennies. Most of them turned out to be wheat pennies, which is kind of cool. I had a couple of 1935, more 1936, a bunch of 1937, and two steel 1943 pennies (both of which were so beat up and corroded it’s hard to tell they aren’t copper). We were able to fill holes in some of my mom’s old penny coin folders with a few of them, and the rest are worth about a cent each so they’re going to be the basis of the next penny conglomeration.

  Pop went through the jar fairly recently searching for good stuff; I’m guessing he got anything worth taking already.

• no foreign pennies were in the reject bin, which I found quite surprising. Either the CoinMaster accepts Canadian currency or I was even better keeping Canadian pennies out of the jar than I was dimes, which I doubt.
• CoinMaster kept 8.9% for themselves, which is a total fucking ripoff. Luckily for them, I wasn’t enjoying the prospect of moving the full penny jar around any more than I already had and my laziness made me defacto captive audience to their pricing scheme. If you’re going to do anything like this, Coinstar gives full value for your change in gift cards at some locations. I was an idiot for not finding one of these.

Now–who wants to guess how many pennies were in the jar?