Quarters

I've been having a bit of a tidy up and clear out over the last few weeks. I have picked through (almost) all of my clothes and packed up the ones that I don't want so they can be given to charity. I have sorted through all of my yarn and posted most of the unwanted items off to various parts of the world where I have friends lingering that said they wanted certain items. I even found homes for all 24 balls of fun fur if you can believe such a thing. I have tackled 'the back bedroom' which is basically a dumping ground for anything that doesn't fit into any of the other rooms. I went through all my craft stuff- condensed, disposed, re-homed where ever I could. I managed to shrink my holdings significantly just by finally admitting to myself that there are some things that I am never going to be working on again no matter how long I keep them for.
Of course this all turned into a reminiscent journey through stuff from the ages of my life. Most of it was nice and 'ah' worthy. I only had a few shudder moments. Finding old diary entries is always a bit horror worthy, especially if I think back to the boy that they were (inevitably) about. I skipped past most of it quite quickly. One of the things that I did dig up though was my quarter collection. The DH and I started this when we went on honeymoon to the states. As with most places they have sort of special edition coins in the states- these ones have little pictures on representing the state that they are from along with that states motto or slogan. We got 16 different states in all as well as some other assorted change:


Not that you can actually see a lot in that photo. But you'll be pleased to hear that I got very geeky and coloured in a map for y'all:


Of course, if you are completely 'state blind' like I am this won't mean an awful lot to you so here's the list too: Alabama, California, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia.
And because the picture really doesn't show you how cute these are (yes, I know- I'm a complete and total geek and america-ophile (or whatever the word is). I'm not even going to bother trying to defend myself on this) here are my two favourites: