For years, I’ve had three primary receptacles for pocket change:

– An old vitamin C bottle that sits inside an old stone crock on my desk at work (Kim Jackson, Mike Henneke and I, as well as others, all throw coins into the bottle, and withdraw them as needed when we need a pop, cookies, candy bar, etc.; we call our little operation the First Vitamin C Savings and Loan, the VC for short).

– A 16-ounce widemouth, longneck Coors bottle that I got at Safeco Field for the bargain-basement price of $6 (it was at least full of beer when I bought it). The bottle sits on my dresser, and I throw nickels, dimes and quarters into it.

– A roughly 24-ounce beer mug emblazoned with the initials of my alma mater, OSU. This is where I put pennies — or at least did until I finally filled the mug last week.

It’s the OSU mug that we’re going to focus on today, and here’s a picture of it, next to a beer bottle to help provide scale:

penny mug

On Friday, I dumped all of the pennies into a lunch box, and my son Bob was nice enough to take them to the bank to get them counted and converted to currency — even though he felt quite stupid about walking into a bank with a lunchbox full of pennies.

So here’s the deal:

I want to give away the bills that Bob traded in the pennies for to one of you readers. All you have to do is guess how much money was in the mug, and whoever guesses closest gets the money, with one stipulation:

I would like you to take the cash and, one way or another, use it to do something nice for someone else.

I’ll give everyone until Wednesday to get their guesses in, then announce the winner and hand over the money, no questions asked. Later, if the winner feels like it, he or she can get back to us and let us know how the money was used.

Thanks for playing and, as always, thanks for reading.