A sea of coins

Ok, this might be the most boring confession ever, but I'm going to tell it anyway. I was struck yesterday with some sort of desire to count the change that Jeremy and I have been saving. We haven't done as well as we have in the past. Years ago, I heard a story about a man who saved pennies. Anytime he found a penny on the street or got any as change, he would take it and deposit it into one of the many buckets of pennies he had collected in his garage. When he finally got around to counting them all, he had accumulated over $10,000. Not too shabby, huh? Well, after hearing this, I thought, why don't we just buy a water jug and empty our pocket change into it every evening. It took us six months (I think) to acquire $300.00. The cool thing about this is that you don't even think about it. 

Anyway, back to the story at hand. I decided to dump out our water jug and count the contents last night while watching Dirty Jobs. By the way, handling money is a dirty job! My hands were black at the end of the night. We sat down and sorted through all the loose change and organized it into neat little piles. I would say the entire process took 3 hours. The result? $198.00 dollars. Unfortunately, after finishing, I realized we are out of coin wrappers. So it's still sitting in my floor. Looks kind of like this:

Not sure what we are going to do with it. Probably keep saving until we have enough to put towards a vacation. I also should mention that at least $25.00 of that came out of my wallet and door in my car. Maybe I'll get better gas mileage with all that weight gone now.