I'm home

Apparently my voice sounds like an engine in desperate need of tuning. My boss sent me home after a quick briefing about the past week and a quick meeting with my team of contractors. So here I sit, congested but with more energy than I've had in a week. I was told to rest.

So now I'm trying to decide: rest upstairs in relative darkness and nap or rest outside on the balcony with a book and a glass of iced tea.

Decisions . . . decisions . . .

I shan't bitch overmuch about the coworkers who, when I greeted them with as chirpy a "Good morning!" as I could manage, ignored me completely. Or the smirky look I got from one when I mentioned I was leaving at the Boss's direction. I don't have to like these people, I keep reminding myself; I just have to work with them. ::sigh::

The collecting urge

It can't have escaped notice that I'm something of a collector: elongated coins (also known as ECs), regular coins, porcelain hands, ceramic cats. (I don't even count books, CDs and DVDs; these are not collections. They are life necessities.) It's one of my beloved eccentricities. I'm on a mailing list for collectors of elongated coins, and recently a trend has started that we've come to refer to as PIF: Pay It Forward.

The idea behind PIF is that kindness is catching. You send out an EC or three to someone just because you feel like it, with no expectation of a return. Someone else may do the same for you. You don't include return address information; the idea is that the kindness is anonymous. I've been participating in PIF for a while and have received some pretty nifty coins. (Today's PIF envelope, postmarked New Jersey but with otherwise no identification, included three pennies, one of which shows a Star of David and a cross linked by a pair of shaking hands with the motto "Peace Shalom.")

Well, the originator of the PIF idea has upped the ante. She's distributed a new list of PIF participants, which offers information about other kinds of collecting that people do. And now I don't feel quite so eccentric anymore. Amongst the things people on this list collect are:

Guitar picks
Penny-in-a-bottle souvenirs
Antenna toppers
"purple stuff"
Hotel room "Do Not Disturb" signs
"Jellyfish items"
Floaty pens
Older sewing needle packs with advertising on them

Out of curiosity, what do you collect?

The London Dungeons

I was watching "Most Haunted" on the Travel Channel tonight. This episode was set in the London Dungeons. In the very first scene with the show's medium, Derek Acorah, there was a penny-smashing machine in the background! Turns out the coins from this location are listed on PennyCollector.com. There are, in fact, three machines, four designs each. Here's the listing—with pictures!

::squee!!!::