Rocks & More Rocks

A not so brief preamble

 Here's the revamped Index page.. Today is Thursday, June 29th, 3:45pm (it's Saturday the first at 1am and Im just putting the final touches on this after coompleting the suppliemntary page, which took foreevr to geta ll that togetherand I feel a lot coming on so I may not get to finishing the meat of this one, but I hope to at least get it started. Which would be about rocks, minerals, and semi-precious stones, etc. And, hey, I  know I've put up a lot recently and I don't expect you'll read it all or at all, but if you're reading this one and haven't read this one  then you should do so. Also, cleanspiration is about your website, and this one has a strong paragraph that I you should take a gander at and I think you already read This 1s for you.

We should really put some emphasis on sushi and especially on touring the RV, I'm just saying.

And promise not to freak out. Know that I can change if you want, if the burden is too much or its too creepy. So, in the case that they need someone local because of whatever reason, and do realize that it's as hard for me to do this (and say it) as it is for you to hear it, but I placed you, along with my sister, as point of contact in an emergency. And I'm still amazed at how incredibly hard that was for me to do. It was all I could do to keep from having an outright break down right there in the lobby. And even now, it's taking every ounce of my willpower to keep it together. Similarly, my phone has an emergency contact feature as well, and you're on that. It's worth noting that my phone emergency list is 5 or 6 deep, while the shelter is just you and my sister.

Anyway, today they had me sign a code of conduct and some papers outlining all of the terms and conditions that are being put into place. Supposedly they'll give me 48 hours notice to enter my apartment but they reserve the right to do it at any time. It truly is like a temporary shelter. It's going to be that way for a couple of years, then they're kicking everyone out. In the interim they'll have me meet with a case worker 3x a month (or more) and start tackling all my barriers to permanent housing one at a time. Dude gave the example of getting turned down at a rental. They'll get full disclosure as to why, and then make sure they have that be a subject of discussion with the next place before the application process even starts. Just getting to meet with a case worker 3x or more in the month of July is a big deal. That's what i need in order to be able to see where I am on the section 8 list, and see about getting moved up so someone else can have my room.  Man, the newcomers, they're not even letting them have but two duffel bags including food to move in with, but supposedly we long term people get grandfathered in and can have a kitchen knife and hot plate and fridge. I don't think the newcomers get that stuff. I've got 4 currently running computers, 2 phones, a TV, two fans, custom bluetooth lightbulbs, a little 3 drawer kitchen thing, 2 shopping carts and a drawer of food, plus a fridge full, my own sheets and comforter, not to mention a pair of windows / linux computers that I don't have running but they do (and the associated small monitors) and the list goes on. I mean this is going on almost 1/3 of the way though my third year here and despite my spending $180 a month on shit and only getting $914 a month in income, I've accumulated a lot. I came here with just a duffel, and a PC with monitor, tom brought the food drawers, i found the big screen tv, tom brought another, i bought 3 used Macs and got my load of stuff (a solid oak tv tray, some rocks, a mac, some electronics, a grip of wires like usb cables and power cords, some bongs and pipes and ancient iMac that now sits in the rv and some extraction lab stuff that I can't wait to get going once I get into a permanent place) that my buddy Mike rescued from going to the dump when the landlord went to clean out my trailer after I went to jail. It took me 5 hours to get it all loaded into boxes, where most of it still stays as we speak, and bags and balanced on the moving cart and shuffled into another room. I'll have to do it Monica-style, but I'm sure it'll all fit into one van load for move out day. And I'm hoping that occurs by the end of summer, which really isn't that far off. Although thats just me putting my hopes out there. I haven't even gotten to speak with anyone yet.

I tried out my first sit in the van and puff a bowl not in the apartment today. I've got to find my spot, wherever that may be. I know where tom goes and if I want to make an outing out of it I can certainly go there. But optimally I have got to find a better closer spot to the apt. I like Walmart, and that's where I went today. The spot I wanted was already taken. We'll see how consistently it's occupied. Which, meh, i need a 2nd place spot anyway. I'd go over to the biglots but thats totally in the sun. I'll figure something out. There's an offleash dog park/park-n-ride right across the freeway, but again right out in the sun. Anyway, I'll get that figured out, it'll prolly have the net result of cutting my consumption down, which would be a good thing anyway. Prolly the only necessary paragraph was the 2nd one.

So, I never did find out what you were processing or having a hard time processing. I assume its all the deal with what you found, but. I have a pretty shoddy record at guessing these sorts of things. You said you were having a shit week. That I assume was just because of all of it: the job, or lack thereof, the discovery, the not having as much money as you wanted. But look at it this way: You have a job, which pays well, its hard work and there isn't as many hours as you would like but at least its something, which is way better than what you had, and the discovery while its shit that it actually was real, and you found it, its what you've been looking for and you knew you were going to find it, you cant let the content of your discovery set you back, you wanted this and you gut it, if you hadn't wanted it you wouldn't have been looking. Think of the positive (I've been over this before, you should know it by heart by now). You have the proof you were looking for. We're back to that if you focus on the negative thats all there will be, focus on the good aspects and ignore. the bad aspects. And then the money, hey I mean you're paying your own way,, you got some serious grub, feel good about that, because you needed it and you needed the dopamine boost from getting what you wanted and feeling good about eating, and not pounding down granola bars that are more corn syrup than granola anyway.

And hey! What's going on for the Fourth?

Rocks, Inc

Washington is known for its agates. In general for its rocks too. I used to be way way into it. Rockhounding was all I did. I researched and read and looked and failed, and kept going. I liked big ones but it took me a while to figure out what to do with them. Finally, when looking through the rock shop at the Richardson's Thunderegg Ranch in Oregon (closed now, I think— ya, google says they closed a few years back, and none of the kids wanted to run it. The owner of Chick-filet bought it but the digging will stay permanently closed. bummer) anyway, I noticed that they had a lot of obsidian spheres for sale. I inquired and found out that for close to nothing ($5 for 1/2" diameter if I remember correctly) They'd sphere anything. All of a sudden I had a reason to gather the big ones. (The ex always says she gets the small shiny ones and I get the big ugly ones, we had that deal —she was my favorite big ugly one, she hated that come back). I gathered the most of them in three ways, one obsidian from Glass Butte outside of Burns, Oregon and two from a 3 ton collection of rocks I bought off this lady after her dad died and three, I bought a random selection of two inch spheres pre cut off eBay. I also got a handful of fluorite spheres made from this massive 150lb boulder I found in a place where there was only supposed to be a wall of 2" think fluorite. We were looking over the boulder pile to the side, and the wife goes "Why does that one sparkle, and its rounded" and I went and looked, and sure enough, solid fluorite. (Come to think of it, that may have been the only time when Jenn did it, but Christon did that shit twice. Both were huge mushroom score, I didn't see. One was a couple of grocery sacks full of Chanterelles, and another time was even more shaggy parasols. I was looking right past them.) Now, I'm not really big enough to lift that thing, so it took two of us and i dropped in my toe once, breaking it in the process, but we kept going finally getting it in the 4runner. When we dropped it off to get it sphered the guy asks where we got it, and we said "outside Challis" and the guy was like that's impossible, i went there myself and it was only a wall of 2" thick. I said yea but in the boulder pile was this one. He said man I bet hundreds of rockhounds over decades have overlooked that one. Yea, buddy they did. The obsidian used to be easy to get big chunks. Now its mostly mining claims and the huge pits are gone. Over in the fire obsidian area, there was 10ft deep pits you could jump into with walls of shiny solid obsidian. All you needed was a little more than a pointy hammer and just to tap, tap, tap and it would crack and you would ease the chunk out. Do that enough in a big enough circle and it would loosen one big chunk. I got a bunch of 4" or larger spheres from that pit. And if you believed the price tags at the Rock ranch, those fetch over two grand each. What i discovered was that, they're only worth what someone will pay  for them. The reason why the Rock Ranch had that many big ones for sale was that no one was willing to pay that much. That was a big bucket of water on that dream. I ended up giving many of them away as gifts. I have some pictures of a lot of them, ( but here's the ones that archive.org still has copies of = silver sheen obsidian sphere, better view of the silver sheen sphere, snowflake obsidian sphere, cool red crazy lace agate,) I had a webpage at one point, MurraysRockpile.com, and I thought, if you build it, they will come. No, they won't, not for rocks. Ebay has a shit ton of rocks, and many of them dirt cheap. You just gotta know what to look for. I like picking a color, blue, let's say, and finding brilliant gem like blue stones that aren't the price of sapphire. Once you get into it, it's easy to do.  Two or three times, I've almost bought a couple pairs of blue iolite earrings, but held back. Probably a wise decision. Plus, I need to get my ears re-pierced before I start buying any jewelry. Anyway.....

Washington has a lot of rocks. There's carnelian agate down in Lewis County. There's apatite not too far from you, Doty Hills or something, not too far from Mimas Mounds, another cool place to go once. There's zeolites (calcite, chabazite, heulandite, mordenite, quartz, stilbite, scolecite, levyne) up on Rock Candy Mountain. There's supposedly garnets near the Walmart in Chehalis. The best place for garnets, hands down, is the star garnet mine in Clarkia, Idaho (you'd think it was in Garnet, Montana, but sadly, no, I went there to check… but there is sapphires right near there and you do find them. although its less rockhounding and more of a situation where they sluice all the sapphires and garnets out and salt bags of gravel with them so you're guaranteed to "find" them). I swear I found a quarter pound one there one year although it may have only been a ounce, but that thing was huge, and its got a 4 rayed star in it. I (Go up the mountain from there to Freezeout butte and there's fist sized low grade garnets, and further along to Moses Butte and they get softball sized. I drove my Datsun B210 out there one summer, its crazy, people in 4x4 trucks were like how did you get out here, cuz the road was all pitted and rutted out and had it been a regular car i would have bottomed out an got suck but because it was so small and nimble, i just went off center and rallied right over everything) I think I told you in another place I gave it to some chick who stopped talking to me a because of that, I had it cut, polished and set, lame. Chicks can be so lame. And fickle obviously. But the garnets are cool. There's also clear emerald, (well clear beryl actually, green beryl is called emerald, yellow beryl is heliodor, blue beryl is aquamarine) called goshenite near there. Of course there's a huge mountain of petrified wood near Vantage, WA, along with a huge pit of diatomaceous earth where they also have tons of opalite that they don't want. There's the crab concretions right down the road from Elma, in Porter, in the Astoria formation. That same layer actually goes all the way down to Oregon and where it hits the ocean near Newport, it actually meets a seam of fools gold at the waterline and has fools gold replacing the fossils, but the water causes them to rust, its still cool though. I still have all my rockhounding notes from all the years I was deep into it. I'd pick the brains of old-timers on email groups and keep the emails. I have maps and all sorts of stuff. Greenwater WA (I got maps and notes to all the sources there too, i went one weekend out with the Puyallup Valley Rock and Mineral Club and they showed me all the spots) has all sorts of jasper and agate, some jasper as big as basket balls. Up near Index, wa or close to Issaquah is rockhound gulch, now i never went all the way out there cuz the trail gets hairy and its private land, but there's big 2ft plates of quartz crystals and fools gold with hematite and quartz strawberry scepters and all sorts of shit, and just a few feet down the road are small claims where you can get hematite cubes on quartz plates, its illegal to poach someone's mine claim so its best to go on a weekday when they're at work. 

That's all just off the top of my head. I could go into more details, but I think I'll leave it as it is. I've included these couple of photos thatI got fro the Department of Natural Resources website, and that link is on the next page with the rest of the resources. Including a handful or two of photos of my rock, mineral and sphere collection. Just a couple. I hope you get some value out of it, there's plenty of info on where we can got to get some stuff, that much is guaranteed. So,, in that way, i guess its all supplementary to the post I did called Let's Go a couple days back. But, as usual, I put in a little blurb on some music and shit that I usually do.

Briefly

First, My Drawings: I thought the first one actually turned out okay. Its just an abstract landscape thing, kinda random.  Not many, very few, people agreed with me that it w as kinda neat, when a similar one got a bunch of votes. I still like the middle one, it was started from a photo I took in Panajachel, Guatemala. it's a mountain town on a lake surrounded by 4 active volcanos. The last one didn't end up as much of a sugar skull as I would have liked but It was still cool. More people liked that red skull than any of the others. I mean, I liked it I just don't get it. Anyway, The other photo I snuck in there is Emily. She's my kid. The one that refuses to acknowledge me.

 Music, I love. I just adore this album by DLR, "Sonrisa Salvaje" He just re-recorded it as Spanish because he head alot of Mexicans really were into it. So he made a version just for them. Pretty Cool.  I can't stand the English version but I love this one. And Little Blue Crunchy Things. I have no idea what their band name refers to but I always liked the band. The ex stumbled across them on the Jenny Jones talk show, or something  like that. We both dug them. Kinda like Black Happy in way but not really. They've got a few albums, but I think this one is the best, The song is pretty good too.

Blast from the past. I got my JM Publishing site pretty well resurrected without many hitches left. I also got my TopShelf Herb Company website up and running too, but I think it's got a few glitches that I haven't discovered and I think I'm going to retrofit a menu on it. The stylesheet was a horrible mess, so I threw it away and started from scratch which is why the colors are a little off, I haven't decided on the best way to go there. Here's those ringtones in case you wanted some, along with all the albums I put up and I think that app that makes the album webpages is just so neat I. may build another app, along the same lines that builds the index by itself just when another album gets added in in and automatically creates its player webpage that will trigger another app to then reconstruct the index to the albums page on the fly, too. (Yea, I actually went and did that, it's all generated on the fly, no coding required) Heheh