in these days with the socioeconomic crisis we may feel pressed for petty. an idea to provide it is to take raw material from nature and build it  into decorative souvenirs that can be sold at convenience stores for petty cash. i bet you could get ten dollars if you just take a crop of coconut tree seeds like the ones illustrated in this article, and place them glued into a piece of tree trunk or bark that you can slice from a tree with a chain saw or hand saw. you might add a biggger miniature coconut like the one i found in a sidewalk two days ago, a two to three inch in peimeter on e, that keeps the same feature as a grown cocunut yet in miniature and still green. glue the composites into the wark base, sandblast and varnish with varnish sprayy and set to dry and "voila!" you have ten dollars worth of merchandise to sell and obtained for free from nature as raw matter! some people in the fray dominguez trail even carve bear figures from old tree trunks with the chain saws and we can carve any figure into tree trunks. your contributor, manuel r. lopez