Sweet! The Petoskey stone is a nice find.
Sometimes, there aren’t enough rocks.
I came back from Michigan with 18 pounds of rocks, mostly Petoskey and Charlevoix stones. The second one in my hand next to the Petoskey is a Charlevoix stone. They’re fun and beautiful, but they’re so soft you can’t get a good shine on them in a tumbler. You can get them smooth but to get them shiny you have to put in a lot of elbow grease with finer and finer sandpaper and then finally hand polish them. Each individual rock takes me about 30 minutes. If anyone is interested in the hobby, the “Michigan Rocks” guy on YouTube is a great resource. https://youtube.com/@michiganrocks?si=K7gYnqah4wr-LbXq
Kris birds, and one of her birding buddies is married to a geologist who goes each spring to a big gem and mineral extravaganza somewhere in Arizona–Tucson maybe?-- which happens to be on the Arizona bird migration path. She’s been bugging me to go.
Tucson has a huge Gem & Mineral show every year:
Yeah I talked to a guy at an estate sale about rocks and he said Tucson was insane.
One more thing: the “whatisthisrock” subreddit on Reddit is ridiculous. You can literally post a picture of any random rock and within 30 minutes or so you will know what it is. Relatedly the “whatisthisthing” subreddit is equally as ridiculous. I swear within 10 minutes on that one any random thing anybody has found in their yard, in their house, or in the world will be identified. Someone identified this as unakite nearly instantly.
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She’s a lucky woman. Kris’s friend, I mean.
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I have been using the Merlin app put out by Cornell’s ornithology department to identify birds in my yard. I really enjoy it.
My outdoor cat enjoys the bird feeders I have put up to attract birds. I hear new birds, she gets more prey. Something akin to two birds with one stone.
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Merlin is a great app, I use it all the time to identify birds.
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Since they added the song identifier it’s even better.
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You can’t throw a rock in Houston without hitting a geologist.
That’s awesome! I’ve got boxes and boxes of rocks and fossils and indian artifacts on a shelf in the barn. My rock tumbler from when I was a kid is sitting there as well, I keep threatening to fire it up again one of these days, just need to order the grits. I really wish I knew where my framed collection of shark teeth lives now, it’s in a box in storage somewhere.
eta: We had a grizzled old Blanco County German family friend who ran the crew when we rebuilt the fencing and cattle pens 15 years or so ago, and he’d see me poking around on the ground from time to time.
“Find you some leavitite?” “Huh?” “Leavitite there on the ground.” Another time at another place he told my brother he’d found an Indian Sex Stone. “Wow, never heard of that.” “Yep, just another fucking rock.”
He did not have an appreciation for rockhounding and artifact hunting.
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So there’s no downside to throwing a rock in Houston?
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Man this a rough crowd.
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You remember Jeanie’s Rock Shop in Houston? She and my mom (kindergarten teacher) were buddies, and they arranged a rock and gem show at SBS every year when I was a kid. She used rocks (and seashells, bugs, dinosaurs, etc…things that kids find fascinating) to help them learn proper letters and numbers and pronunciation and such.
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No but I bought a rock tumbler at an estate sale a few weeks ago that had a sticker from that shop on it and so I looked it up to see if it still existed. (The tumbler burned out on me after only a couple uses. It was really old.)
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My brother was into rocks and rock polishing when we were kids so we went to Jeanne’s all the time. I can still remember the sound the tumbler made very clearly.
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This is good. I’m glad someone remembers it.
As I got older, high school age, I would often eat at the taqueria that was at the end of that strip mall, which at the time was El Alteño. It stayed open late, maybe all night, and I certainly took advantage of the hours. My dad independently discovered the place, too, although I think he dined at more traditional hours. It was his go-to for tacos de lengua. He was one of those poor people who have some genetic defect that leads them to hate cilantro. I’m glad that’s not something I inherited.
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