Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Resisting Change

I love the earth as much as the next guy...maybe even a little more than the average bear. I try to do what I can to lessen my personal impact and God knows after the Wife watched "An Inconvenient Truth" our home life became anything but convenient. Hello? Are those 5 gallons buckets in your beautiful shower? Why, yes, yes they are but doesn't our grass look nice?

Anyway, I know that paper money is not great for the environment. I know it has a fairly short shelf life and even though it is comes from a renewable resource coins are much better. They last longer and that means less energy is used producing them.

Got it.

Except I'm American and coins don't mean much to me. Back when we lived at home at even given moment there would be 100's of them floating around the bottom of my numerous handbags, inside our furniture, in our cars, under our dryer, on the floor...and I never missed them or really ever tried to use them. Just like the bobby pins that litter my life I took them for granted and only occasionally put them where they needed to go.

Indian ruppees come 50 to a US Dollar so you can imagine how careless I was with those coins. If I couldn't garner enough energy to pick up a dime back home no way I'm caring about a fraction of a penny.

Now here we are in Greece and using the Euro. It takes $1.30 US Dollars to make up one of these puppies so I care a great deal more. Except I'm dealing mostly with coins for the smaller denominations and it is driving me bonkers.

I can't seem to wrap my head around the importance of a coin and I think they are too small to keep up with. I want to casually stick them in this pocket or that pocket or just let them loose in my purse.

I'd like to appeal to the EU and suggest that if they're going to keep this coin thing going they should at least make them bigger...like the size of those Plinko discs from "The Price is Right"...I could keep up with those.

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