June 5, 2002

• Wow!  You guys are quick. 

  
  

  The way I’ve chosen to explore parts of Xanga I haven’t seen yet is to click on some names in other people’s SIR lists as I work through my SIRs.  Today, by the time I was through the list and back here to post this rocky thing that has been bumping around in my brain since yesterday, four of the ones I’d just visited had already been here.

  
  

  This “rocky” thing:  A big box of rocks came in the mail yesterday.  Bitner’s, our favorite rock and mineral wholesaler had a moving sale and we went wild, ordering stock for Greyfox’s Last Stand and raw materials for my jewelry.

  
  

  All you could hear around here for an hour or so was the rustling of packing papers punctuated by oohs and aahs as we passed the primo chunks of stone around to each other.  We got several cheap pounds of druzy quartz on matrix, some of the matrix with interesting crazylace patterns.  It could take five years or more to sell it all, but it is SOO NICE!

  
  

  There were also several pounds of pieces of azurmalachite, some of it with chrysocolla, each piece unique and beautiful…even a few with nothing but twinkly midnight blue azurite crystals.  We were all totally blown away by the bags of lepidolite with rubellite.  Some are just chunks, others are polished angular cuts, but the neatest are the cylindrical drill cores.  They, and most of the botryoidal hematite, and all of the acicular malachite, will go to the stand.  (That stand is a 1984 AMC Eagle station wagon my old fart calls the only 4-wheel-drive rock shop in Alaska.  He sells knives and other stuff, too.)

  
  

  For my jewelry work, I have here by my elbow two pounds of little pieces of celestite:  ice blue stuff with awesome metaphysical connections.  Most of them will be earring dangles, but there are ten or a dozen that are big enough to wire-wrap for pendants.

  
  

  Those are just the bulk items.  We also ordered a few choice pieces that were sold individually, including half a dozen big flat plates of fossil-filled sea-bottom.  I already bought from Greyfox one of the three wulfenite specimens, little tablular crystals that look like butterscotch.  I’m going to highgrade the azurite, too, and buy the best piece of it for my collection; likewise with the pink fluorite.

  
  

  I have to watch out not to indulge the rock collection addiction too much.  My collection is displayed on the top shelf of an entertainment center that I had to tie to eyebolts in the wall studs when it got too topheavy.

  
  

  Okay, that’s just the details.  What made me want to write this down was something I noticed as we pulled all these anonymous wads of newspaper out of the box.   They were randomly distributed, everything mingled together, no way to predict what one would unwrap next… and yet, every piece of the wulfenite fell to my hands for unwrapping.  Why not?  I love the stuff and he is unmoved by it.

  
  

  He’s so air-sign dominated in his chart that he tends to float away, and I’m heavy in the earth signs.  Therefore, it’s only fitting that he picked out and unveiled most of the heavy, grounding hematite.  The piece I undid was foamy rainbow hematite with a dab of druzy calcite, a rock very much to my taste and disposition.

  
  

  Coincidence, you say?  I think not, don’t believe in such superstitious nonsense as coincidence.  At the very least, it had to be synchronicity.  More likely it was just the same phenomenon I’ve noticed and discussed numerous times in various rock shops and museums:  some people are simply drawn to some stones. 

  
  

  What’s your favorite rock?

  • 5:49 pm
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