Plogging Along, Singing the Same Old Song, Back to Back

Way back in the early days of the information superhighway, before the blogosphere was fully formed, who would have ever thunk that a weblog would become a thing? Not this ol' Val, that's for sure. Then I figured out what a blog was. I had a supersecret one. Then branched out with this one. First it was a mommy blog. Then a daughter blog. Then a puppy blog. Let me tell you, by cracky, I'm ready to branch out again. Start my own thing.

The PLOG.

Yeah. Don't go getting all excited. Don't call CNN just yet. It's not really newsworthy. Just a way for me to tell you that I'm going to blog about my found pennies as I find them. So at times, this may seem like a penny blog. Take it or leave it. Same as a floor penny. You may not want it, but somebody else might. So be forewarned, and hopefully not forearmed, depending on the concealed carry laws in your various states. I WILL display my pennies as I find them, on my PLOG.

Of course, like a watched pot peevishly refusing to boil, The Universe may make sure that I never find another penny, now that I've resigned myself to inflict my discoveries on my already-bored-with-them readers. So it's possible that you all might have dodged a penny. But not TODAY! I found TWO!

Sorry, antipennyites. Today you will have to be placated with the details of my day, which I'll put before the pennies. It did not start out to be a good day. Good thing I'm not a smoker, or I would have been tempted to join those Brownsville Station boys on floor number two. Nothing was going right.

I woke up with a malaise. Something disagreeable was gurgling in my digestive tract. I've had a pain in my right under-ear area for a whole day, every time I open my mouth. Last night when I chewed food, I had a shooting kind of pain like when you have the mumps and eat something sour. Surely you all had the mumps, right? No vaccine back then for us. I've also had a pain in my back for three days, which I attribute to poor posture when driveway walking. Add to that a pain in my joints because I didn't take my ibuprofen last night, lest it was the reason for my stomach ailment.

THEN as I got ready to leave for town, I realized that I hadn't heard Hick fling the dry dog food into the metal pans this morning on the back porch. So I went around to feed the dogs and give them water, which meant I had to unlock the house and go back in to the sink in the laundry room.

There were no good songs on the radio. All three of my usual parking spots were taken at Country Mart. AND I encountered a lottery ticket machine malfunction! (That story is coming up sometime in the future.)

It seemed as though my suffering would never end. I made a right at the light to head over to Casey's by the moat, rather than going through the light and taking the alley, since a lady almost rammed me barrelling out of the gas station chicken store parking lot yesterday into that alley. Of course once I made my right, there was a line of traffic about 15 cars long, so rather than pile up traffic behind me waiting for my left turn, I went on up for a mile or more, to loop around the dead-mouse smelling post office block, since there is absolutely no other place to turn around and get back on the road easily.

As I turned onto the Casey's parking lot, I saw that ALL PARKING SPACES WERE OPEN! The only customers were at the gas pumps. I toyed with the idea of parking by the door, but went on down several unmarked spaces to near the end. About two slots up from where I usually put T-Hoe. I gathered my winner and opened the door, and there it was!

I got my phone out of my pocket to take a picture, and just as I was focusing it, a car pulled in to park beside me. Yeah. Every other unmarked space available, and that car chose to park right beside me. I started to pull my door closed politely, but then I thought, "No. I was here. There are plenty of other spaces. So that lady can wait, or she can move over one."

See that? If she'd parked there, if I had been a bit slower opening up my door, if I hadn't gone up around the post office and come back, if I hadn't been tied up for 10 minutes in Country Mart...I never would have found that penny! That lady would have parked over it, or another car would have been on it, somebody else would have picked it up, or it might not have been dropped yet. Just saying, so many little things combine to make that penny-finding experience what it was.

From there, figuring maybe my luck was turning around, I went to the gas station chicken store for my 44 oz Diet Coke. By the road, not the alley. I parked over by the moat and went in. Right inside the door, I saw my second.

It looks shiny there, but it really wasn't. Not on the Abe side, anyway. A little old man was standing on that rug to the right. The side-counter area. He gave me a look when I bent for that penny. Too bad, so sad! If it was HIS, he should have scrambled for it like a football fumble. I don't think he even knew it was there. Probably just wondering what I was doing, stepping in the door and bowing down.

The Casey's penny on the left is from the year 200 D. Yeah. I can't read the last digit, because it has been driven over and scraped off. The gas station chicken store penny on the right is from 1994. That's the year Genius was born, in a deep and dark December. I've added them both to my pennies from heaven stash, and only last night asked Hick to find me a container for them at the auction or Goodwill. He said, "Oh. I just saw the perfect thing at Goodwill on the way home. It was about a foot tall, and wide, like a martini glass, and made of really thin glass." I think I may have to be more specific in what kind of container I want, because that doesn't sound like the perfect one to me.

Anyhoo...today I found two pennies, #30 and #31.

I've got myself a PLOG, and a leg up on being a pennyillionaire before I'm 2089 years old. That's a random age. Don't go trying to calculate pennies per year.