ISO - WI and WV

Scott's change bottle

Danger, danger! This is a post about money.  As you can see from my change bottle, it's not about a lot of money.  To be precise it's about $12.00.  When I'm finished it'll be about $12.50.

In 1999 my Dad gave my sons a book for collection quarters that were part of The 50 State Commerative Quarter Series  for Christmas.  He even filled in some of the quarters for them.

My sons being who they are, they weren't too impressed with the gift and one of the books got lost.  I snagged the other book and sporatically put quarters into it.  The book sat in a kitchen cupboard.  Since no one but me ever cleans out cupboards in our kitchen that was a safe place to keep it.

As a part of my upcoming kitchen re-do I've been looking in all the cupboards.  There are many things in those cupboards that haven't been touched since I moved into this house.  This weekend I found the quarter book.



All filled in.

 I hadn't added any quarters to it since around 2004.  It reminded me of my Dad and I decided to see about taking care of the rest of the quarters.  I raided Scott's change bottle and to my surprise I've got most of the quarters.   The commerative quarter series was fairly popular.  My book was put together early and didn't include the tag-along quarters they issued in 2009 for terriroties and the District of Columbia.  Poor DC is always getting short shift.

I was lucky to find most of the quarters, even the ones from far away states like Alaska and Hawaii.  I imagine if they were issuing the quarters today Hawaii would put Barak Obama on theirs. It amuses me to no end to hear people claiming that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.  Hey idiots! Hawaii is a state!

The quarters I'm on the lookout for are ordinary states: Wisconsin and West Virginia.  The quarters were issued in the order they entered the union.  I was surprised to find West Virginia so late in the sequence, as it abutts several states that were in the original 13 colonies.  

One thing I love about my job at the Department of Energy is that we deal with states.  When I started out I used to talk to respondents on the telephone.  I loved dialing and getting people with regional accents.   There were a lot of things I didn't care for about Bill Clinton, but I liked his accent, except when he talked too long.

When I started programming I came to know a little about every state.  Each state is different and although some are bigger or more important energy-wise than others they all go into the total.  The cardinal rule of my job is that the U.S. total is the sum of the states.  I know the alphabetic abbreviations of all the states and the numeric codes for a good many of them.  When I begin to be able to rattle off their average number of Heating Degree Days (number of degree-days where the temperature is below 68 degrees) it will be time for me to retire.

 I've been to many states and hope to visit them all in my lifetime - although I don't like to fly that well so Hawaii might not make it.

My current home is in Maryland.  Our quarter has a picture of the state house.  I don't know why they picked that, usually Maryland likes to highlight to Cheseapeake Bay.  I grew up in Kansas - they've got a Buffalo.  I'll be curious to see what Wisconsin (protesters burning down the capital building?) and West Virginia (how about a big pig with Bryd written on the side of it?) have on theirs.

Do you know what your state has on it's quarter?