Burried Treasure

I went to the house the other day with the idea of doing some yard work.  I had noticed the area behind the shed was pretty overgrown, and I wanted to trim it back.

I had also noticed that there was some stuff back there that I wanted to dig out and throw away, and thus began my adventure.  Trimming the branches back was the easy part.

Then I had to go for all the stuff.

I found a bunch of random stuff in bins, old toys, papers, arts and crafts from one of the girls that used to live here.  The first exciting find was in the coupon expando-file.

Five bucks cash!  Sweet!  Now I would be looking at every little thing not just out of curiosity, but to look for more treasures.  I checked an old purse and found more money.  Just some old coins, but money is money.

In addition to the random toys and stuffed animals, I found bits and pieces of PO's life.  Actually, of his wife's life.  Yearbooks from Chula Vista from 1978-1983, old pictures, some craft projects from when she was a kid, info from the maternity wards of the hospital about pre-natal care then bringing the baby home.  I was able to put together a fairly interesting story, but don't have all the pieces.  It seems there were 4 kids (at least in the pictures) and the oldest, born in 1985, whose crafts and workbooks I have, was not PO's kid.  I have the paternity papers.  Yeah, there was a lot of stuff back there.

I looked through the photos.  There were quite a few of the cats, a few of the kids, and a couple of the house.  I pulled out the ones of the house, but may try to give PO the photos of the kids.  I'm not quite sure.  The ones of the house show it before they added the front planter (which will be going) and also before and during the installation of the front walk.  Those were informative, answering the question of why the front side of my yard is slightly raised above the neighbors' and lumpy:  it looks like that is where they dumped the dirt they excavated when they installed the walk.

By far the biggest find of the day were the 1976 Canadian Olympic coins, complete in their leather case.  I had to pry the case open pretty hard, but inside were 28 shiny, silver colored coins.  Each had a plastic cover over it, and only the one that had slid out of its spot showed any signs of wear.  I thought these might be worth something, but didn't want to get my hopes up.  They were uncirculated coins minted for the Olympics not too long ago, they might not be worth anything.  I packed them in the car and looked them up online when I got home.  There were quite a few coin sets minted, but they are sterling silver, so there is some value.  There are a few sets on eBay selling for around $800!  I have to say I was pretty excited.

It turned out to be a fairly productive day, even if the side of the shed I had gone there to clean turned out worse than when I started.