Another Old Check in a Book

  Not as old as the last one, but definitely written for more!  This one, I definitely cashed.

California Couple Finds 10 Million Dollar Gold Hoard!

  Now, I'm sure by now you have all heard about the California couple who stumbled onto 10 million dollars in gold coins while walking their dog. I know this sounds like the beginning to a bad joke, but it's not. These two hit the damn jackpot. And they weren't even using a metal detector. There are hundreds of articles out there at this point, but I thought this one had a good selection of photos.

http://www.newstimes.com/news/us/article/Couple-stumbles-upon-10-million-in-rare-coins-5266388.php

Star Me Twenty

  This is only the third star bill I have found and the highest denomination, the others being a one and a five. This one has a low serial number, too, starting with 002. At least, I think it's low, judging by the paper money people on ebay and such.

  As I have explained in previous posts, the star on bills seems to indicate that the bill is replacing an error bill that was removed from the lineup. So the serial number stays the same as the reject, with a star placed beside it. They have some appeal to collectors because of their rarity, especially if the serial number is unique in some way. So keep an eye out for those star bills! 

  I actually threw this one up on ebay this morning, so we'll see what happens. Hell, anything over twenty is an improvement, right?

The Real Gold

  That's right. I found a solid gold bullet. They are used for killing werewolves, and sidehill gougers, and dreams of success. It turns out that five hundred years of silver bullets have caused lycanthropes to build up an immunity that can only be circumvented by the use of golden ammunition. Someone must have missed, as the bullet is intact, which means he or she was probably eaten after the stray shot plunged into the icy salt water of Penobscot Bay. This was a propitious find for me, due to the recent increase in local murders attributed to cryptozoological anomalies, and the fact that I can reuse it for self defense.

  Ok, so it's not gold. It's copper-coated lead. But I thought it was gold and got very excited for a few seconds. Physically excited. I mean, almost erotically excited. Gold! It's not gold. It looks like gold. Then I looked around at the abandoned winter beach I was detecting. The frigid waters rolling up onto the expansive, shell-strewn, nearly frozen sand of the shoreline--interrupted occasionally by cruel outcroppings of the ancient, weather battered rocks and boulders that define coastal Maine. The awful wolf moon howling in the sky and twitching on the uneasy salt sea surface. The dwindling timeless twilight of a New England February dusk settling around me, and I remember why I'm here, and what I'm really looking for, and it isn't golden bullets.

Mental Detector

  This is from an odd little book I found called "Worms of Wisdom" by Peter Mason and Patricia Martin. I related to it on multiple levels.

Diamonds Are For Never

I  You know, I have never found a real diamond, and I thought all of that had changed in an instant. I wasn't even metal detecting--just walking along, looking at the ground for gold and diamonds, as I have a tendency to do, and there it was. I picked it up and thought, no, it couldn't be. The earring still had the clasp on the back, so it must have fallen out of someone' sprocket or purse, or was torn out in a terrible "cat fight" and flung aside in the melee. I pulled off the clasp and could see the number 925 imprinted on both pieces, so I knew it was real silver, at least, and that led me to believe that it may be a trinket of high enough quality to hold a real diamond. I stewed over it for a day or two, imagining how I would reuse the enormous rock in a new piece of jewelry designed by myself for Laura and trying to research diamond identification techniques online, which are ridiculously varied and complex, by the way. Never, do the "scratch test", by the way. It doesn't hold true and it ruins the diamond. Finally, I took it to a local jeweler and asked him what was up. He looked at it and said "Hmmm". It's an impressive looking stone, sparkling brightly and large enough to be quite valuable, were it authentic, which he then said it was not. "How do you know?" I asked him. He handed me his glass and said, "See the clear ring around the edge? That means it's cubic zirconium. Diamonds don't have that clear ring." We both laughed at my ignorance and I thanked him before going on my way. I have accepted his statement as truth, but I'm going for a second opinion anyway. Maybe he just hates people who find real diamonds and wants them to be very sad and depressed all the time.

  (Also, pardon the terrible state of my fingernails. Stonemasonry does a real number on my extremities.)

Check This Out

  Though not as exciting as the Confederate bill I found last time, this "book find" is still pretty interesting. I was photographing a large, ornate Bible for an ebay listing yesterday and found a check dated 1881 tucked inside--a check for a whopping one dollar. Incidentally, if you are wondering what one dollar meant to someone in 1881, the inflation rate is such that it would be equivalent to roughly 24.43 in today's economy. I am currently engaged in trying to locate a bank that will cash it for me, and thus far, am having no luck.

Basement Find

  I have always heard that dirt basements are a great place to hunt, especially in the winter, when the ground is frozen solid. The thing is, this basement doesn't have a dirt floor, but is 99% poured concrete with just a dirty hole in one corner for a submergeable pump. My friend Ronald and I have been performing some minor restorations down there and while scraping around in the mucky pump hole, he spotted a greenish little disc-shaped object, which turned out to be a coin! He cleaned it off in the water and found it to be a quarter-sized coin of Arabic origins, the year and denomination of which I have yet to research, but here are a few shots: