Seasonal Treasure Hunting

Here's what it looked like outside my house 3 weeks ago. Since then the temperature has pretty much stayed below freezing. And then we got an inch of snow last night. Suffice it to say that the ground is frozen solid. So the metal detector stands quietly propped up in a corner, awaiting fairer weather. But that doesn't mean that treasure hunting has to take a season off. As I've discussed in previous missives, there are multiple ways to reap the bounty of treasure that the earth provides for us.
The post-holiday time is a good time to start roaming through the thrift stores, as people clear out the holiday clutter in their houses. There are a lot of donations made between New Years (resolutions to clean out) and the Spring thaw when people open the windows and do Spring cleaning.
Another option is moneywalking. When snow is on the ground, dropped coins disappear silently. Match that with cold fingers and people fumbling with gloves on, and you can find dropped coins on the ground as the snow and ice start to melt. As the piles of snow started diminishing last week, I walked through town and found 5 coins on the sidewalk under parking meters. They wouldn't be there on a sunny Summer day, as they were dropped in snow and the person who lost them wasn't about to fish through a snowpile for a nearly invisible silvery dime. For the same reason, there can be coins in parking lots as people drop them when getting car keys out of a pocket.
Coin roll hunting is another good snowy-day activity that can feed your treasure jones if you don't care to traipse through icy parking lots and city streets.
Oh, and don't forget to check those Coinstar reject trays when you go in and out of stores. You may think they will never have anything in them, and usually you will be correct, but occasionally you'll hit some that have several coins in there and you'll be able to enjoy that little adrenalin surge of finding treasure. Aarghh.