Thursday, November 8, 2007

Obsessive? Compulsive.


So last night we were talking about our childhood and one of my friends mentioned that their significant other would listen to the top 40 and write down every song and chart them and record the ups and downs. This person still has notebooks filled with this stuff. I mean, every SINGLE Saturday, Casey Casem (sp?) and that crap he spewed and the little inspirational moments as well as the awesome awesome top 40 hits of the week. What did their friend's think of this? Did they have any friends? No, I'm not making fun, at all, for once.

I did not have many friends. We lived in condos and the youth population was usually scarce. There were tons of old people like Miss Bea and Mr. Bob. They all had poodles too. But I digress. Anyway, I used to collect coins. Any weird foreign coin, Susan B Anthony dollars, Bicentennial quarters...you name it. But mostly just pennies. Lots and lots of pennies. There was a system too. The 2 dollar bills from Grandma on my birthday went into an envelope. The foreign coins went into their own box. The quarters and Susan B.'s each had their own special jars. The pennies (except for wheat pennies) all went into the ceramic piggy my Mom gave me. I was like a little 8 year old coin librarian.

When I would get bored, or when the pig was filling up, I would pour all of the pennies out. I would sort them into piles by decade and then later sort the decade piles into individual year piles. If I knew I had way more than 2-3 hours to kill, I might even seperate them by mint ( thats the little D on the coin near the date). Now, you might already realize how bored and /or lonely I was. But its about to get worse.

After sorting into piles I would start in my Mom's bathroom and then work my way through her bedroom, into the hall, down the stairs, throught the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen and finally into the downstairs bathroom. What was I doing? Well, of course I was laying my pennies out in a straight line through all of these rooms, in order, by date. But wait! The system continues!

If, and that's a strong IF the pennies reached from bathroom to bathroom, then I would count each date of pennies and if I had 50 of any given date (and mint of course) then I could roll them and label the outside of the roll and put them in my extremely heavy shoebox filled with rolled coins. At one point I had like 50 bucks in pennies that were rolled by date.

So, after telling you all this, you may now realize how I can make quilts all the time. Its all in the system, the level of insanity, the healthy dose of OCD (I contest the D), and a lot of money for fabric.

3 comments:

clairella said...

this explains SO MUCH.

Anonymous said...

i line things up.

also i arrange my leftover food into composition when i finish eating at a restaurant

carrie faye said...

WOW! i was with you until the bathroom thing... when we still lived overseas, we would flee the 110+ summers for wyoming where i had 1 good friend and a few that would do in a pinch. if good friend was busy, i would find other ways to occupy myself.
one of my favorite busymyself pastimes was lining up my pennies horizontally by decade, each year of the decade was then laid out vertically under it's "decade-head" until my mom would barge in and decide that the dog "wanted to see me" and then everything was lost in one rambunctious iloveyoubutwhymustyoudestroymyworkpuppydog! greeting.

i knew we were soulmates.