Like always, it's been a while since I've blogged. Today I thought I might spend a few minutes describing something I did last night that was, at best, a pretty useless waste of time.
Over the last umpteen years, we've had this big plastic coke bottle that, I guess, is supposed to be some kind of bank. I hate to carry change and never do. So anytime I have change in my pocket I put it on the bedside table at night and then drop it in the big plastic coke bottle in the morning on the way downstairs.
I've been wondering lately how much was now in the bottle. A few years ago, my wife actually counted it and found that it contained about $400.00 and it was only about a third full. Lately it been getting closer to the top and I've been wondering what's in it now. So I decided to count it. I told my wife and she understood cause she had been wondering herself. I asked her for an estimate. She said $1,200. I guessed it was a little bit lower, maybe $1,100.
So here's the numbers.
First of all, it weighed about 88 pounds. If you knew something about the statistics of change, like how often you got quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies in an average financial transaction, you could probably calculate how much was there. But I can count better than I can do statistics.
So I set about separating out the coins. I worked on it about an hour and then had to go fix supper. I do supper on Saturday night. Burgers on the grill. After supper I went back to work with help from my daughter. She'd just had an argument with her mother and found separating coins to be therapeutic. As we separated the coins into piles of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and a few Sacagawea dollar coins, I stacked the quarters into a box in 20 dollar (40 coin) stacks. Basically, I count one stack and make the rest match the height After about 3 hours we were finished. I then stacked up the dimes in 5 dollar stacks and the nickels in 2 dollar stacks. I didn't feel like stacking the pennies so we weighed them and divided their weight (22 pounds) by the weight of a penny (2.5 g) to get a count.Final count:
coin_______________total val_______number_______weight g
Sacagawea dollars_____8.00___________8____________64.8 Quarters____________790.00_________3160________17917.2
Dimes_______________230.00_________2300_________5216.4
Nickels______________70.00_________1400_________7000.0
Pennies______________41.00_________4100________10250.0
Total_____________$1139.00_____________________40448.4 g = 89 lbs.
The total value comes from adding up the values of the stacks, except for the pennies. The number comes from dividing the total value by the value of the coin. The weight comes from multiplying the number by the weight of each coin (which I got from wikipedia). The total calculated weight is close to the experimental weight of 88 pounds so I guess the count is fairly accurate (1-2%).
So then I tossed them back in the bottle till the day when we fill it up. And now it goes back in the closet. It looks like this:
