More Quarters?!

Sorry if this is old news to everybody else, but I just now found out that Washington, D.C. isn't getting left out.

Neither are Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or the Northern Mariana Islands.

This has caused me to realize three frustrating things:

1. Where am I going to put these? Has anybody made up a 57-spot quarter book?

2. I still don't have all my state quarters! In the middle of writing this post, I went to scour my change cup to see if I'd missed any and, lo, there was an Alaska! However, I still don't have Hawaii. I'll admit that this may be because I don't use cash very much, but I really think I have bad luck with state quarters. I'm sure that well over 50% of the quarters I do have were given to me by my mom. (Thanks, Mom. . . . Do you have any Hawaiis laying around?)

3. I don't know anything at all about the Northern Mariana Islands. This one is probably the most easily remedied problem of the three.

(Dorky postscript: when I went through my change cup, I sorted all the state quarters and this is what I found: 3 of the 5 1999 states are represented, but I'm 0 for 5 on the 2003s. I didn't have more than 3 of any state except Wyoming, of which there is a shocking preponderance.)

(You can tell it's late, because that's when I start casually tossing out words like "preponderance." I don't know what it is about being loopily tired that makes me use big words, but it came in handy during many a paper-writing all-nighter.)