Two cents for 2010

I found a penny last night and another one today. Yes, that’s only $.02, but it does add up. $1.73 of the $75 found in 2009 was in pennies. Most of these were picked up one at a time. I did find 21 pennies together on one fall day but that is pretty rare.

I also found a flattened fork today. I don’t know why, but I love finding discarded metal cutlery. I seem to find most of these pieces in colder weather. There is some kind of winter – throw forks in the street correlation going on.

Additionally, I went out to walk the dogs in the evening New Year’s Day and found that a neighbor had dropped off a free bike for me in my driveway. It is the first free bike of the year, number 129 since I started picking them up in 2006. This one is no doubt the most high-end I have yet obtained. There will be more on this one later.

A few days ago I found this Virgin of Guadalupe pendant. It’s not valuable, but it’s a neat thing to find. It’s roughly the size of a penny and about the same color. I used to collect religious items like statuary, crucifixes and icons, purely for decoration. I was raised protestant, so we didn’t have these kinds of things around. As a child, crucifixes and statuary seemed especially scary to me. The crucifix depicts someone’s death after all, and the veneration shown to statues of the Virgin or other saints imbues them with a sense of the unknown, even to an avowed atheist such as I am now.