The Cruise Fund has been DEPLETED

At first glance, my adorable denim sequined bag looks very unassuming. However, upon further exploration, after peeking inside you'll realize it is quite assuming indeed. It's full of cash and coins!

Some time ago, Eric began saving coins that he picked up off of the ground. When we started dating, I joined the quest not only by picking up coins but adding my tips from Kimonos to the stash. Eric uses cash to pay sometimes, so he adds to the fund with change from time to time, but for the most part, all of the coinage is from the ground. We started referring to this as our Cruise Fund, and since we're leaving for our Royal Caribbean cruise one week from today (!!) I decided to deposit the contents of the Cruise Fund into our bank account to pay back the credit card payment we used to cover the $525.30 cruise charges including taxes, fees, and gratuities.

I carefully counted and rolled all of our savings and here's what we put in today:

• $256 in cash (thank you, Kimonos patrons!)
• $160 in quarters (640 quarters, 16 rolls)
• $60 in dimes (600 dimes, 12 rolls)
• $20 in nickels (400 nickels, 10 rolls)
• $17 in pennies (578 pennies, 34 rolls)

I wish I had had my camera at the bank because they had these fun little metallic color-coded trays to put the color-coded rolls in (you know, quarters=orange, dimes=green, nickels=blue, pennies=red, pictured separately here), and it looked so festive and colorful!

The final tally included, coincidentally, nearly equal amounts of cash and coin. Along with the $256 in dollar bills, we collected $257 in coins! Weird! And in the end we put in...

...$513!! If you'll remember, our cruise total was $525.30. So if Eric hadn't stolen $13 in cash this morning to take to work, we would have had exactly the amount to cover the cruise with 70¢ to spare to toss into various fountains as we wander through Nassau. Crazy! And exciting!

We had a one penny remainder, and I got a $10 tip the other night from a generous sushi-eater, so we have $10.01 in our brand new Fund. Who knows? Maybe this next one will be a Car Fund!

In other news:

• I baked some organic Jack Skellington cookies for Eric's "secret goblin" at work (don't tell!)
• I returned my Bahamas for Dummies and Cruise Vacations for Dummies and found out that my library doesn't charge late fees (!!)
• the piano is being delivered tomorrow (!! again)
• last night we saw En Vogue in concert at Epcot for the International Food and Wine Festival. At the end of the month, we're going to Boys II Men's free concert! Anyone wanna join us?!