Presidential Dollar Coin Program

Are you getting a taste of autumn yet? I can sense it coming around these parts but we are still enjoying warm days. Here is a taste of this week’s Thursday Rundown…

Pinball Wizard – When Sid, Sloan, and I went to Silverwood last weekend, we played at the Retro Arcade. It was filled with arcade games from the 1980s and 1990s such as Donkey Kong, Street Fighter, NBA Jam, Pac-Man, and many more. Best of all, it had a row of classic pinball machines! Some of the game themes included Wizard of OZ, Twilight Zone, and AC/DC. However, the one that Sid and I played was called Arabian Nights. Sidney and I each took a couple turns on the machine with my wife actually setting the high score for that day.

Sid playing the Arabian Nights pinball game at Retro Arcade in Silverwood

Sloan’s Board – On Tuesday I wrote about Sloan’s first day of school and shared a photo of her posing with her back to school board. I have decided to devote some time and space from this Rundown to give you a closer look at the board’s design and content. Sid purchased the design from Etsy, filled it in with Sloan’s information, and had Walgreen’s print it out. We then placed it in a frame and let Sloan pose with it. You didn’t go to school on the first day if you didn’t have a board, right?

This is the board we created for Sloan on her first day of Pre-K 4.

Dollar Tree Ice – And if you don’t know, now you know! Over the weekend, my sister and I both discovered that bagged ice is now offered at Dollar Tree stores, at least the ones in Spokane. I wish this product made its debut at the start of summer because we certainly would have taken advantage but better late than never.

It is true! Dollar Tree now has ice. I took this photo at the Dollar Tree on Sullivan in the Spokane Valley on Sunday.

9/11 20th Anniversary – It seems like as the years go by, it gets tougher for me to watch September 11 programming and re-watch the horrible events from that day. I tried watching the first episode of “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror” on Netflix but had a real tough time. With that said, my admiration and sympathy for those individuals who showed bravery beyond words that day hasn’t wavered a bit. As we mark 20 years on Saturday, let us pray for those who lost their lives and their families. Let us also be thankful that an attack of that scale has not occurred on American in the two decades since that Tuesday morning.

It isn’t just a cliché….we truly must never forget.

Dollar Dollar Coins, Y’all – I can’t believe it has already been 7 years but on Sept. 9. 2014, I wrote about a surprise I received from a vending machine…and I am not talking about a bag of chips I didn’t select. When I inserted a $5 bill for a $1 item, my change was distributed in the form of four $1 coins. These coins happened to be of the Presidential $1 Coin Program variety, something I had never heard of before but sure was interested in once I had. In this blog post I posed multiple questions, including whether people would look at me funny when I tried to re-insert them into circulation (they really didn’t).