Skip to main content

Mud, Sweat, and Clear

 Spring is arriving in the Deep South, with four seasons in one day weather, storms, and all the usual stuff. With Spring comes rockhounding weather, and the family and I went on our first dig a few weeks ago. 

The location was a rock quarry in the town on Summerville, Georgia. The event was hosted by the Georgia Mineral Society and a group from Alabama. We'd had rain a few days before but the weather was perfect on the day of the event, starting with a cool morning and warming into the afternoon. Of course, the North Georgia clay that is predominant in this area held much of the rainwater so everyone ended their day a bit muddy and sticky but it was well worth it. 

Summerville is home to a type of rock known as the Summerville agate. These rocks are a beauty to behold and are found throughout the area. The quarry is also rich in quartz so a great many of the pieces we brought home have bands of clear white quartz running through them. 

It was a great way to kick off the 2022 rockhounding season and was soon followed by a trip to Franklin, North Carolina to search for gemstones, but that's another story for another post. Now get out there!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Regarding Keeslyn

In January 2020, a young lady named Keeslyn Roberts disappeared from a fuel station near my home. The case remains unsolved. This post will examine the actions, and lack thereof, of those in authority, and how this contributes to the case remaining unsolved. But first, a little backstory. As a teen, I lived in the same neighborhood as the Roberts family. Keeslyn's father, Eric, is older than I, and I don't recall the two of us having much interaction. His sister, on the other hand, is the same age and we've been friends for over 40 years. It was she who told me about Keeslyn's disappearance and the family's frustrations with the lack of police action. To learn more of the specifics of the case, numerous podcasts and news stories are available online. To my understanding, the police reaction to the disappearance has thus far been little to no reaction. After no word from his daughter for several days, Eric went to the fuel station where her car was parked. He th...

The World In Which We Live: Safety Is An Option Edition

In a world in which Fight Club , The X Files , and the complete works of Phillip K Dick have collided into one twisted reality we call normal (with a dash of Black Mirror and The Big Short for flavor), we now learn that software upgrades that could have prevented the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max passenger jets were available... at a price . "Want your passengers to live to fly another day? Sure, but it'll cost you." And I'm unsure who is more evil, the manufacturer for making safety features ON A FLYING MACHINE optional at additional cost or the airlines for declining to install the features. This is a stunning failure of human decency in the eyes of this writer. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. This is business as usual in our extortionary economy. In the US, medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy , a real-world manifestation of the "your money or your life" ethos of the street thug in literature and film. The hand wringing over w...

In Memorium: Shaun Mullen, A Most Generous Man

Author, editor, blogger, and so much more Shaun Mullen has passed. Noting his blog  Kiko's House  hadn't been updated in a while, I did a search and discovered his  obituary . My friendship with Shaun goes back to 2006. While living in Australia, I'd discovered his blog when searching for informed commentary on US foreign policy in the Middle East. Sadly, much of that policy remains unchanged 14 years later, but that is for another post. Shaun  had noticed that his blog wasn't rendering correctly in Internet Explorer and asked if anyone could suggest a fix. I, being a bit of a tech head at the time, suggested Firefox or similar browser, and the problem was solved. We kept in and out of touch, finding common ground in music (I mentioned my love for the Grateful Dead and Shaun sent a dozen CDs of concert recordings. By International mail. The man was generous to a fault.), worldview, and more. My old site got its greatest number of hits when Shaun linked to a few o...