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It was a weak year for found stuff. Here’s the sad summary:
| Value | Quantity | Total |
| $0.01 | 64 | $0.64 |
| $0.05 | 11 | $0.55 |
| $0.10 | 15 | $1.50 |
| $0.25 | 2 | $0.50 |
| $1.00 | 1 | $1.00 |
| Total Found: | $4.19 | |
2005 was the worst year for found change since I started keeping records in 1996. Ah, well. Maybe people in the Mooresville area will prove to be less careful with thier loose cash. 
You know it’s spring when the ‘shrooms start a’poppin’! I shot this in the backyard this morning — nice little yellow. Give it a week and it’ll get huge (I hope). Now if I could just sneak out into the back woods…
update: we managed to get back into the woods a couple of times after I made this post. Found one other shroom, but it was very dry. I’m amazed it came up at all. If we get some rain, things should start popp’n.
Well, 2004 is gone and it’s time to count the booty. Here’s the final tally for 2004.
| Value | Quantity | Total |
| $0.01 | 111 | $1.11 | $0.05 | 7 | $0.35 |
| $0.10 | 24 | $2.40 |
| $0.25 | 3 | $0.75 |
| $1.00 | 5 | $5.00 |
| $10.00 | 1 | $10.00 |
| Total Found: | $18.61 | |
All in all, that’s a really good number for a year. The last minute $10 was a real boost.
Time to reset the counter!
Every family has their strange little customs. Some of these are serious, and some of them are just fodder for inside jokes. It’s part of what makes a family a family.
Torracas like to find things. Our game is to see who can find the most change (pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, etc.) on any given family outing. Some family members are pretty, um, exuberant about finding change. We’ve had mall outings where this family member will deliberately stay well ahead of everyone else just to get first look at the ground – and she’s very thorough. Occasionally we teased her by tossing pennies in her path – there is some debate whether these plants count toward the final total.
The game has some rules (at least for my part). You don’t pick up change that is obviously belongs to someone – say, change close to where a checkout clerk is working. He or she probably needs it for their till. For the most part, if you can make a connection between something lost and the person who lost it, you do it. For me, it falls under the James 4:17 principle: “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.”
Sometimes, this is a hard rule. Once I found a $100 bill in the Campus Center at Houghton College while I was a student there. I was already plotting on how to spend the money, when Karen, playing Abigail (see 1 Sam. 25), wisely advised me to turn the money into the office. It was fortunate that I did – no sooner had I turned in the cash, when a forlorn student came in looking for it. It was around then that I decided whatever money we found in a year would be donated to the church as a special (if small) offering. I like to find things, but figured the Lord could find a better use for the money than I could. (For the record, I found a second $100 bill in a Massachusetts supermarket. I offered it to the person I thought was the owner, but she turned it down. I didn’t wait until the end of the year to donate that one to our small church.)
Since Karen and I have moved away from most of the Torraca clan, we have kept on looking for things, though we don’t really compete. It’s just fun, and occasionally profitable, to find things others overlook. I especially like to see how our little finds accumulate over time, so I created a little side bar for this blog tracking finds. If you check it out, you’ll note that finds are not limited to change. Once you start looking, you see all sorts of things.
My Grandma T once found an emerald and a nice diamond in the same parking lot. I’ve personally found gold, diamonds and plenty of silver. A few weeks back, I found an approx. .25ct diamond in a pendant. Some unthinking, and now sorry, lady had used a very cheap gold-plated chain to hold the pendant; a weak jump ring evidently betrayed her. Tools, from sprockets to hammers to entire toolboxes (Dad), also turn up. A cousin of mine was trying to assemble a complete deck of cards – sadly, he was called home before he could do it.
I’ve been thinking how our little game of finders-keepers might have a lesson in it. I’m not satisfied with what I’ve concluded so far (there must be more), but here’s my thinking at this point:
God gives us blessings. Often they are easy to see: family, beauty of the world around us, comparative wealth, food, a country where we’re free to worship, etc. But sometimes I think we miss other blessings simply because we fail to look for them or stop to pick them up. Why did I find the two $100 bills? Because they were there to be found and I was looking.
$100 bills and diamonds are the exceptions; we average about $8 in change a year. It’s not much, but it proves the point – we found the money because we were looking for it and willing to pick it up. To put it another way, if we had not been looking, we would not have the money. Would our lives be less by not finding $8 in change? Certainly not in terms of income, but in a way, yes we would be less for it. We’d miss the joy of discovery, the practice of seeking something out, the opportunity to make a novel offering to the Lord at the end of the year, and perhaps a small insight into what it means to “seek the Lord.”
I’m still working on my thoughts on that last point. Perhaps in another post.
Have you found anything interesting this year?
My parents are in town this week. Thanks to a gracious Grandma watching the kids, Dad & I were able to get into one of the local fields for some artifact hunting. It turned out to be a very good day for me — in fact the best I’ve had in Indiana to date.
2.75″ dovetail (Tippecanoe Co, Indiana). I’m pretty sure that’s a missing ear at the top, but since that side seems resharpened, perhaps it is an ancient break & reuse example
half of a banded slate bannerstone (Tippecanoe Co, Indiana)
O.k., so the banner stone is pretty well chewed. Still, it’s the first banner stone I’ve ever found. I suspect this is a really good site — hopefully I’ll get the chance to go back some time.
