Triple the fun

Hello faithful readers, herewith are pix and prose from our last four days. As usual, the pix are top to bottom today to Saturday. Now, in case you think that I skipped school the day they taught counting to four, let me qualify that we spent Sunday doing nothing. That said, today we went to jewelry wrapping class at a local rock shop called the Black Hat Trading. They have buckets and cases of all kinds of rocks and minerals, plus teach classes in jewelry making and beading. Today Duane and I both made silver rings, gold bracelets, and learned to wrap cabochons, which are gems or stones rounded on one side and flat on the other. We did this in four hours. We are now multi talented.

mine on left is copper suspended in glass
Duane's on right is tiger eye

I say our rings and bracelets are identical. Duane says that his is much better.

The next 3 pix are of our day geochaching in the desert yesterday. We drove about 30 miles to BLM land to begin our hunt. There were 100 micro caches commemorating Medal of Honor winners. We are proud to say we found them all. We packed lunch and spent 5 pleasurable hours driving along the dirt road jumping in and out of the truck every 1/10 mile or so hunting our quarry and signing the logs. Our reward for our perseverance was the beautiful sunset and the fact that we got back on the highway before dark.

This cache is in a piece of yucca. It is representative of how the caches were hidden, in plastic "test tubes" with a roll of paper naming each MOH winner and a list of cache finders.

These next pix were taken Saturday on our field trip with our new club, the Deming Gem and Mineral Society. This is a rather fancy name for a bunch of rockhounds, but you couldn't find a nicer bunch of folks unless you were at a blacksmith convention. We were taken in a train of seven vehicles to several different spots (again out yonder on BLM land) in search of agates, or, more specifically, BIG agates. Mostly, of course, we found smallish ones, but Duane and I each found a respectable specimen. Of course these must be cleaned, cut and polished. I put Duane in charge of using the saw at the club, since I don't allow myself too near power tools, especially the sharp kind. When our rocks are presentable, then we can put our new wire wrapping skills to good use. The pix give a idea of what you see when you leave town limits. This the "country" outside town. The Hereford is representative of not only the open range, but of the type of cattle that were the elite before Black Angus became king.

This is me in my desert rat outfit. The sun is hot here, but the breeze kept me in my sweatshirt. I'm holding my water and my rock bag.

Here we all are at the last stop, but it could have been either of the other two. Here we found agates. I must say that I like the people in this club. I now know that I am not the only person in the world who gets out of a vehicle and immediately looks at my feet for interesting specimens, or walks around with the odd rock or two in my pockets.

We really enjoyed our sightseeing and rocking and caching. As I said we took Sunday off and have planned nothing for the next two days except for our walks and maybe cleaning and sorting our rocks. Christmas Eve Duane will take me to church at 5pm. At 7 is a gift exchange with the Escapees. After that I have planned my usual ritual of reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I always look forward to that. Christmas day we will have bacon and sweet rolls for breakfast and open presents sent to us by family members. At 3 we will be sharing dinner with our Escapee family. All in all a very pleasant ending to a very pleasant week.


More as it happens,

Louise and Duane