One year ago today: May 19, 2016, my $11 shopping spree.
Five years ago today: May 19, 2012, Harley wannabe.
Nine years ago today: May 19, 2008, ground penetrating radar.
Random years ago today: May 19, 2009, a hundred bucks a day—back Wallace!
That’s the sediment tray from the Peace River, near Wachaula y’day. Visible on the shovel blade is some representative granular riverbed mixture I described. Most of it is not rock, but I will systematically pick through it once dried and see what we’ve got. Talk is next trip we take the boat out a ways to find anything of interest, I’m not optimistic. What we brought home is screened and sifted. What’s left is bland-looking. Then again, we are not geologists. So you must be proud that we at least tried, right? Aw, c’mon, be nice.
This expedition cost me nothing, always a good sign. The hospital bed sold so I donated my share to fixing the truck tire. Didn’t I mention it had a slow leak and had to be topped off all the time? Now we have a truck in operation, with a robot club battery and a robot club tire. So I mean other than that, it cost me nothing. I don’t unsay the old adage that money can’t buy happiness, but it does get rid of most of the obstacles.
My interim conclusion is we need to find a better part of the river. If there is no gold, then we look for artifacts. There were Indians in the area 12,000 years ago and that means middens. Pardon me, chief, while we go through your garbage, it’s something the chiefs in our modern civilization do the most of. Except they don’t keep their society’s trash on riverbanks, instead they use computer banks.
It surprised me the rock took on a little variation is color, more so than when they were wet. These piles are dry, the brigher spots are mussel shells. Nobody knows how to sort this yet, so stick around and see if I learn anything. This is tedious so to keep things moving, I was also staining the bench chair rails.
I had fun with my music, learning the tunes the new guitar guy sent. It’s rock music and I am rusty, so much that I had to resort to my trusty piano to figure out the passages most of the time. Unless the recording is really bad, I can always get the riff on the piano. The new guy has shaky timing, but that could be lack of practice. It’s easy to memorize timing. Looking over my records, the worst music mistake I made this year was that ignoramus from New York. In the end he learned nothing because he thought he was smart enough to twist me around to learning his stale old song list.
This is the worst type of guitar player. He’ll promise you the world, but at practice there is always some reason he can’t play or hasn’t learned anything off your list. When it gets to his list, well, he wants to change that little part, and then the other little part, until rehearsal degenerates to his hidden agenda, which is converting you to as backup to his bastardized guitar parts.
That’s the ways it’s done and he was just agreeing to your crazy theories to get a chance to show you how to do it right. I wonder what he would have thought if I’d informed him that even talking to him on his level was like dealing with a somewhat retarded elementary school janitor. That’s the guy that could only listen to music on smart phone and thought that was good enough to play in a band. Where do they even?
Texas hill country.
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This shows the sorting operation, the first pass is to remove the shells and plastic fragments. The really small particles are more trouble to handle than they are worth, so they will be sieved out and scanned with a magnet. Then out they go.
Whoa, what’s this? It was only a few moments before I found my first shark’s teeth and a for real fossil. These are tiny, so tiny I can’t get any closer with my camera. The five shark’s teeth are easy to spot. I’m calling them shark’s teeth only because I’ve seen them in souvenir shops. These are hardly commercial size, but every such first is blogworthy. The fossil is harder to see, it is the larger piece on the left atop the teeth. It is some type of mollusk shell fragment. Next to it is a piece of something with a pattern on it, so I kept it. And the fang-shaped piece could be anything. The striations in the material suggest if might be petrified wood.
I’ll take that as substantiation that the river has something we can market. When a complete rookie like me can find something on the first try, and in a portion of the river that can be expected was picked over, the environment is there. We had already discussed taking a boat upstream for a look-see so this provides some incentive.
My readers, I emphasize to you that this fossil and gold hunting is dreary and tiresome, I can only tolerate it by multi-tasking, this case, I was watching a DVD movie, my Friday day off movie. this one was “Monte Walsh”, like I believe John Wayne and Tom Selleck are cowboys. But the Selleck movies are masterpieces of cinematography, though most of their scenery tends to have a considerable less mud and dust than was really there. I get a different message from the movie. They want you to believe big eastern money came in and destroyed the cowboy life.
In this movie, a big eastern money takes over a cattle ranch. The reality is when the eastern people showed up, they saw what a monstrously inefficient operation was going on and darn rights they set about streamlining it. It’s a lot like having an accountant on your gold-mining operation. You make different decisions when you find out what things really cost. And the horse that can’t be broken? Shoot it. Go play rodeo someplace else, boys.
[Author’s note: at the same time, it is the easterner’s fault that business practice has to be changed to be efficient—because the definition of efficient rarely fits reality. In the old days, a cowboy would risk his neck to break the bronco and gain a reputation. If he broke his leg, he crawled away and became a cook or something. Now, he sues the corporation and goes on disability for life. Efficiency too often means not leaving the other guy alone and then moaning when he fights back.
Besides that, efficiency is not some ideal goal. Most American corporations are inefficient because they can afford to quash startups and competition. It’s too difficult to compare the cost of whether leaving the cowboy alone at an inefficient job or putting him and his family on welfare for life is the greater. Most people would, I think, opt for leaving him alone. But the system does not give them that choice. The system is too eastern.]
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, 1949
The chair rails are drying. I’m finished applying the stain. This may be basics to you, but this is the finest furniture I’ve ever built. This English cherry stain is on pine wood, the brand is Minwax for it had the primary virtue of being handy when I reached for it. Much the same applies to the women who lasted with me. I’m sadly reminded of the broken chisel episode, because two years after that I got a desk, and it was unfinished wood. The store guy said it should be stained, but I didn’t know what that was. No, you could not just ask. You want your head slapped?
That baffled me. Why put something on and then wipe it off? You waste good stain and you ruin good cloth, punishable offenses in that household—punishable no matter that it was not their desk, stain, or cloth. Seriously, Your Honor, that’s how bad it was. I figured I had bought the one can of stain in the world bearing the wrong instructions.
I recall it was mahogany stain. Chosen because the label said it would “bring out the deep, dark tones of the wood”. Only the rich people in town had dark red furniture, so I was sold. But how does one “apply” stain? I didn’t know, so I painted my desk with mahogany stain. That’s right, (painted the stain with a paint brush and left it). I didn’t wipe it down or sand between coats. Where was I supposed to get sandpaper, anyway?
And don’t laugh like that is some rhetorical question. If there had been any sandpaper, the situation was that everybody would demand their “equal” share of it. My family quickly learned to hoard things they didn’t even need. They knew if I ever got my hands on supplies in sufficient quantity, I would build something. Like all do-nothing people, they did nottake to being made to look lazy as well. So, that’s a serious question—where was I supposed to get sandpaper? Anyway, the new lawn chair rails came out so nice, I had that whole plywood desk flashback.
[Author’s note: that little plywood desk was something else. Very little actually got done on it for a simple reason. It did not have locking drawers. And by age ten, I’d learned what happens in peasant households if you put a lock on anything. The siblings who “never went in my room” would take turns going through that desk every time my back was turned, and you can laugh shortly when I tell you why they did that. The real use of that desk was symbolic. It worked like this.
I had the highest marks in town, that’s in every grade and in every school, not just the one grade I attended, Sparky. It was assumed that I spent long hours studying. In fact, I never took a book home or studied even one hour in my life in grades 1 through 12. I read along in class to what the teacher said, that’s all I needed to ace every course. Are you still with me? Well, my brothers and sisters also assumed I had to study for they could not reconcile this mentally when I neither watched TV, nor was I ever at that desk.
See their logic? To know anything, you had to do one of those two things. Since watching TV didn’t work for them, it must be that desk.
They concluded there must be a trick. See the peasant rationale? Actually, I was surprised as hell when I asked for the desk and got it. My parents also thought I was a study addict and thus didn’t dare not buy it, lest word get around. I never actually read that much until I was 25. But that desk, to those people, symbolized the “trick” I was using to “pretend” I was smart. My god, did they search that desk for years on end to find my secret fountain of smart.]
ADDENDUM
While all this is going on, I was studying rock polishing in considerably deeper detail. More correctly, it is called rock tumbling. It is hardly the easy hobby they claim. I doubt that the majority of people could successfully carry it off without an extended period of trial and error. Even with the best instructions, the process requires so many inspections and decisions that I predict there are fifty rock tumblers out there sitting idle for every one put to use. Allow me to elaborate.
Read in a more critical way, the instructions are constantly warning the user about rock hardness, cross-contamination of grit sizes, tumbler weights and capacities, fractures, protrusions, and a host of considerations beyond the capacity of most people. See depiction of ancient Chinese rock tumbler.
I know about the Moh’s scale, but then, I passed a gemology course in the 90s. The rock polishing is a four-step process (rough, medium, pre-polish, and polish) that uses various grits, powders, soap, pellets, and slurry mixtures. These consumables must be purchased, stored in proper conditions, and carefully measured before use. If you purchase the ready-use “gem” mixtures and do a basic cost calculation, you’ll know you cannot compete with the commercial big outfits who operate rock tumblers with 6,000 pound capacities.
What’s more, each batch requires four weeks more or less and a location where the noise won’t bother the neighbors. That alone makes it a far different brand of hobby, more akin to home brewing in detail and in patience required. And in the end, you can’t drink a bottle over a congratulatory dinner. The real clincher in my opinion is the need to keep accurate records throughout the process. Do you know of anyone who keeps meticulous records as a hobby?
Of course you do, and that is why I intend to give this rock tumbling a try. It has another objective, which is the demonstration of robot club standards to a different undertaking. Agt. R has seen the dozens of reports that accompany club activity. Make no mistake about it, keeping people informed is a major effort, taking about 15% of club resources. And our records are not kept by filing clerks, but exclusively by upper management. Like this blog, it don’t matter how smart you are, it don’t write itself.
There isn’t much intention to sell polished rocks. There’s lots of reasons to plan ahead in such detail as to know what you’re in for. It’s called look before you leap. According to Agt. R, the attention to detail I consider normal and necessary is off the local scale. I’ve studied sixty pages of instructions, viewed four hours of video, priced out the grit, and if you recall, refurbished the tumbler and added a switch. I now know it is a 3 pound Gem Sparkle model 3A-N.R. that came out in 1963. The 3 pound capacity refers to the total weight of rough stones and the drum together, that is, the load to be turned by the motor.
And Friday is my day off.
[Author’s note: so I went out. On a Friday. Between the yard and processing the river muck, I was busy until after dark. Now, I have no trouble reading a book or writing a letter in a bar. I often do unless the place is full of babes. This time, it was not. Just the heifers, the bored frumpy housewives, gals night out type of thing. Think cheap perfume and foundation garments. They love blocking the aisles so that every man has to do the excuse me or squeeze past and get a dirty look. That’s pretty universal, it worked at the cave entrance, and for the women who still like cavemen, it evidently still does.
And it was hooker-hair night, as well. Far too many pseudo-blondes in the place. The weight per woman was around 80 stone. The infrequent okay-looking one was usually surrounded musk-ox-like by self-appointed chaperones. So, I found a quiet corner and wrote some letters, got that all done. Why don’t I hit on fat, middle-aged women? Call it an abundance of caution.]
Last Laugh
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