When Dillon was a little guy, maybe 18 months or something, he decided he liked beer bottle caps. He started a meager collection with (I believe) a Guinness, a Newcastle, and a Corona. Eventually, he shared his collection idea with his aunties Cheri & TJ and his Grandma Vickie and Aunt Mary Ann, and now it is not uncommon for us to leave one of their houses with a small bag of bottle caps. I've been handing these to Charles and sort of forgetting about them, and then the other day the subject came up, and Charles said, "you wouldn't believe how many of those we have now."
I forgot about it again until Dillon saw a recent bag and he wanted to play a game with them. He's big on games these days. His first idea was that we throw them at each other. I vetoed that one. Then he suggested "we could just slide them across the table at each other!" I nixed that one too. (I know, I'm no fun at all!) So then he decided we should sort them to see all the different kinds. That was fine with me.
We dumped the bag that he had seen onto the counter and started to sort. Rose joined in the fun. We were through a quart-sized ziplock bag full in no time, and I asked Charles to bring up the rest from the basement. It turns out he'd been dumping them into a small garbage can, and it was almost entirely full of bottle caps.
At Dillon's direction, the kids picked "teams"- Rose was Newcastle, Dillon was Corona, and I was pretty much everything else. Dillon had a pretty safe bet, I think everyone drinks more beer in the summer and Corona with lime is a hands-down favorite on both sides of the family. The kids were hilarious, albeit somewhat disturbing- "Mom, I just gave Rose a WHOLE BUNCH of Newcastles!"
"That's great, honey, you are a fantastic big brother!"
And just the fact that Rose spotted a Newcastle cap sandwiched between two Corona caps clenched in her brother's fist was pretty impressive…
So after sorting through the caps, Dillon won with about ten pounds of Corona caps, Rose came in second with about five pounds of Newcastle caps, and I was a distant third for quantity, though had an impressive diversity of caps, from Ice House to Soy Sauce (some would say soy sauce is better to drink…) Lakefront, Sprecher, New Glarus, Sierra Nevada, Red Stripe, Peroni, MacKesson, Killians, etc. The ones featuring animals are the kids' favorites, though, I need to find this Elephant beer that we have one cap from… And then at some point I need to figure out a plan for what to do with twenty-five pounds of bottle caps.
I'm thinking something like the Art Bar… Any other ideas?
um, yeah, I think we still have another bag full for you.
You could create a piece of art on an entire wall. That would be cool. Some sort of mural. Maybe of an inflamed liver…
What kind of hobbies are you encouraging over there? ; )
Yeah, now my kids can identify beer logos. Of course, we’re working on the media-literacy thing, so D can also tell you what a logo is and, you know, develop a marketing campaign and junk.