Ann's Musings on Geology & Other Things

Buddy and KC (almost a year later)

2012-02-23T13:31:00.000-06:00

Last year, I found out my dog KC had congestive heart failure and that she was on borrowed time. So I wrote a post about KC here . It was troubling to learn this and I tried to do what was best for her after all she was 13 1/2 human yrs or 95 doggie years. For awhile she would take her medicine but then she started to refuse to take it. I would hide it in pill pockets, she'd eat around it and spit the pills out. I would grind it up and hide it in food. She'd refuse to eat the food. I would grind it up and put it in the pill pocket pouch and stuff it down her throat, and she would upchuck it. Finally I just gave up trying and accepted the fact that this is the way she wanted things to be. She knows she's at the end of her days and has accepted things for the way that they are. I never thought she would make it this long. But the other day I just had to take some pictures of her and Buddy together. She was growling at him to get off of her but he didn't want to budge.

Here Buddy looks like he's trying to talk sweet nothings into her ear, and she's trying to ignore him.

Now I muse if I will ever make it into my 90's.

My Tulip Magnolia is in bloom

2012-02-17T14:22:00.002-06:00

Remember last spring when I wrote that it felt like spring was here and I posted this blog post. Well that was done on February 26, 2011. I was amazed at how early spring came last year. Well it started even earlier this year and this has me so concerned.
Here's some pictures of the same tree. I feel like if I didn't take them now it would be too late. The sad thing was it started to bloom and then we got some freezing weather and it caused the blooms to turn brown and are now falling off. It is not going to be as spectacular as it has been in the past. But it still is impressive.

The tulip magnolia just starting to bloom on Feb 8th 2012.

One week later
And here's how it looks like today.

Tulip magnolia or Japanese Magnolia.

Tulip Magnolia or Japanese magnolia Feb 26, 2011

See how spectacular it was last year.

Another picture taken last Feb 26, 2011.

It used to be I never expected the tree to bloom until March because of when I first saw it blooming.

Here's a picture on March 16, 1994 showing the Tulip tree in full bloom. We had moved into the house the year before during the summer and we never saw this tree in bloom. We were amazed by it and had to get some photos.

I just happened to write the date on them so I would remember when it bloomed like that. Can you believe its 18 years later and blooming one month earlier than it did before. I know the flowers will be long gone by the time March rolls around. Already so many pedals have fallen off our yard needs to be raked.

Hot Springs AR

2012-02-06T13:06:00.003-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, when I was transferring all the stuff we had to do to the new calendar, I noticed that we had nothing scheduled for the weekend of Feb 3-5. This is such an usual event for us, because it seems like there is always something going on where we have something we have to do, or go. I mentioned it to my spouse and he was amazed too, but then he remembered it was Super Bowl weekend and figured that was probably the main reason nothing had been scheduled for Sunday. Saturday was just a fluke, and I thought nothing more of it.
But he didn't, after New Orleans lost in the play offs, he really wasn't interested in the Super Bowl as to which team would win - he liked certain players on both teams; so he decided to surprise me with an early Valentines day gift. We had been talking about going up to Hot Springs Arkansas for quite awhile, but never seemed to find a good time to go. He decided this weekend would be the perfect time for us to get away, and scheduled a stay at the Arlington Hotel.
The Arlington Hotel has always been a special place for us. When my eldest child was just a baby, my husband had to go to a business meeting at that hotel, and we came along too so we could start our vacation from there. My son was teething at the time and was very fussy and was not going to sleep that night. To quiet him down, I took him down to the lobby at 2 a.m. and was letting him crawl around in the sitting area, only problem was he finally decided he wasn't going to crawl anymore. He took his FIRST steps there!! I was so excited. I wished I had my camera but it was packed away in my luggage and never did get those shots. The next morning I couldn't wait for his daddy to see what he could now do, by then he was walking all over the place and there was no stopping him. We were so busy watching him that neither one of us thought about taking any pictures, and the opportunity was lost forever.
That was about 24 years ago and we have only made it back there one other time - again with children. We both felt like we were long overdue for another visit there for just the two of us. This time it was so much nicer because we were not on such a tight budget and could take advantage of the hot baths and other amenities the place offers. After all that was what the area was always famous for its Hot Springs and rejuvenation properties. The Bathhouse row is now part of a National Park.

Hotel Arlington, Hot Springs National park

Here's a view of the Arlington hotel from Tufa Terrace Trail.

The Arlington Hotel lobby, Hot Springs AR

This is the area where my son started to walk, its still basically the same except the rugs and upholstery have been updated.
But this is what got me really excited about being there. Is seeing this as we pulled into the parking garage.

Look at those fold rocks. Aren't they beautiful. There wasn't a whole lot of geologic information that I saw which really disappointed me. The park is big and we didn't make it to all of its attractions and I probably missed the display where they talk about the geology. Most of the stuff we did see was all about the historical significance of the area and the way its always attracted people to the hot waters.

From what I can figure out these rocks are Lower Paleozoic rocks of the Ouachita Mountains. According to "Geology of National Parks" 6th ed by Ann G. Harris, Ester Tuttle & Sherwood D. Tuttle (2004) Ch 52 pgs 779-790, The rocks that outcrop in the park are: 'The Womble shale, Bigfork Chert, Polk Creek Shale of Ordovician age; the Silurian Blaylock sandstone and the Missouri Mountain Shale; and the Arksnsas Novaculite which is Devonian and Lower Mississippian in age.'

Here's a closer view and a different angle. There was definitely faulting in the area and it looked like its the overhang thrust of the Stanley Shale but I don't know it for sure. The Arlington is located in the Y of Fountain street and Park ave and Central ave.

The folded rocks behind the Arlington parking garage

Most of the geology that I saw talked about how the Hot Springs are formed. They mention that the rain falls onto the highly fractured Arkansas Novaculite. It takes about 4000 years to percolate down through the rock. (though some of the waters they think make be as young as twenty years). As it does down it gets heated by rocks of high temperature and then flows out as an artesian springs. The water comes out in the Hot Springs Sandstone outcrop along the the traces of two thrust faults that that parallels the Hot Springs mountain anticline.

Here's one of the springs anyone can get water from.

Noble Fountain, Hot Springs AR

Since the area was famous for its hots springs, bathhouses sprung up around them. Now the area is not as popular as it used to be around the turn of the century and started to run into decline but people have stepped up and turned most of the bathhouses into historical landmarks. It still is a fun area to visit.

Bath House Row, Hot Springs National park, AR; Arlington in background.

Fordyce Bathhouse National Park visitor center & Maurice Bathhouse to its left

One of the more popular attractions to the park is the Hot Springs mountain tower. In the past we were here during the tourist season and was not able to go into it and see the view from the top. I was so glad we went when we did because this time we had no problems getting in and seeing things. It is very much worth the effort to do.
Here's the tower.

Hot Springs Mountain Tower

I really liked seeing the north view. You can see the Hot springs Mountain Sandstone is right next to the Stanley Shale beds in the valley. I really got a feel for why the springs are where they are.

The north view from the Hot springs Mountain Tower

This picture is to the east and you see the Hot Spring mountain and the Arkansas novaculite mountain.
The one thing I don't like about the area is the vegetation is so prolific you don't get to see a lot of really fresh outcrops unless an area has been recently cleared away.

East View from the Hot Springs Mountain tower

   Years and years before, I had been to the area with a friend that was a geologist. He had been here before on a field trip. One of the things they did was to collect quartz crystal from the Coleman mine. He took me to this mine and we had a great time collecting some crystals. Through the years and with moving, I either gave away or left behind most of what I collected. I always thought that I would be back here some day and never really worried about not having the stuff anymore.
   Well with this trip I thought I would see if I couldn't find that mine again. I got on the internet and found out that there's now two Coleman mines --Jim and Ron. It turns out they are brothers. I remembered I could see the mine from the shop and figured I must have gone to Ron's mine.
   My husband knows how I'm with rock shops and things like that. He knew I wouldn't be happy until I went and visited the area and see if things were the way I remembered them. I wasn't so keen on going because the night before there had been a terrible thunderstorm and the weather was foretasted to be bad all weekend long. I was hesitant about going since conditions were predicted to be so miserable and I'm to the point now I hate being cold, wet and miserable. We decided that we could at least go to the rock shops since they would be mostly inside. So the first thing we did Saturday was head out to find them.
Boy was I glad we decided to do that. I could not have asked for a prettier day. It was in the high 60's, mostly cloudy sky's with the sun occasionally poking through. Since it had rained so much the day before everything was nice and wet and easy to see.
As we drove along Highway 7, I saw some interesting things. Near Mountain Valley, and the Glazypeau Mountain I saw a piece of land that was cleared away and was for sale. Since we had nothing better to do we decided to turn back and look at it. Here's what it look like from the road.

But then as I started to walk closer this is what I saw. Isn't that some amazing folding and faulting. I was so glad we had stopped to look at it.

And this is as close to it as I could get without wading through a deep, deep puddle.

Finally we got to the Coleman rock shop. I thought we were at Ron's but it turned out we were at Jim's. Just look at the crystals they have sitting out front. If you look really carefully you can see the penny on it for scale.

This one the penny didn't make it in the photo but they still were impressive to see.

Quartz Crystals in front of the Jim Coleman Rock Shop

It took awhile but my husband was finally able to drag me away. I couldn't wait to see Ron's mine and if it was the one I remembered or not. I was so excited I was like a little kid in a candy store.

Here's Ron Coleman's mine and it was just as I remembered it. Even though it was wet. I just had to go out and try to look for something. When you go there you are not allowed to go into the mine itself, but you are allowed to look in the talus piles. You are allowed to keep what ever you find and can carry out. They give you a bag to put your stuff in.

Ron Coleman quartz mine

Ron Coleman quartz mine, Jessieville, AR

According to the Howard's, Darcy & Mike "Collecting Crystals - the Guide to Quartz in Arkansas" (2000 pgs 13-14) the crystals are formed in the Blakely sandstone, Ouachita Mountains (Orogeny) during the Late Pennsylvanian age (290-245 million years ago.) During this time the seas were closing thrusting the land mass to the south up to the north and forming the massive continent Pangaea. The sands in the area were heated and some of them melted yielding a silica rich solution that was able to precipitate out in the open fractures of the rocks. These long quartz veins formed along the fractures because that was where it was easiest for it to travel. Eventually some of them got filled in, but not all of them and thus individual crystal can now be found in those open fractures. It appears that the crystals were formed only during the mountain building time of the Pennsylvanian and had stopped in the Triassic. Most of the crystals are in the crystal belt formations of Crystal Mountain and Blakely sandstone. The Blakely sandstone was deposited during the Ordovician age (400-500 mya) based on fossil evidence.
From my observation the sandstone is pretty fine grain and there is a lot of red clay associated with it. All of which leads me to believe it was deposited in a fluvial to sub-aqueous environment, but I didn't have enough time to really study this and figure it out on my own. Everything I was looking at was in the tailing piles and thus were out of place.
Here's some rocks that lined the road to the tailing piles.

veined sandstone, Ron Coleman quartz mine

This next one gives you a really good idea of how the quartz formed along the fractures of the rocks.

quartz veins in a sandstone @ the Ron Coleman mine

This was the area we were allowed to look in for the quartz crystal. As you can see it doesn't give you much of a feel for how the matrix rock was deposited..

Ron Coleman quartz mine where you are allowed to hunt for quartz crystals

I did find quite a few crystals but now I have to get them cleaned up since they are all covered in that red mud/clay. We did find some really nice pieces but they were too heavy for us to haul out so we left them there for some other strong body person to get.
While we were there another family was there also. My husband and I would chuckle every time we heard the young girl scream at the top of her lungs, I've found another lucky rock.

I mused upon the Lucky Rocks she found and realized she'll remember this the rest of her life, just like I have all those years ago when I wasn't much older than her when I first saw this mine. I wonder if she'll become a geologist too.

If you ever get a chance you should definitely check out the Hot Springs area, and the Coleman mines.

And I forgot to include what Wikipedia has to say about it Hot_Springs,_Arkansas.
Hot_Springs_National_Park
Here's the geology of it from Wikipedia

Geology

The thermal springs are situated in the Ouachita Mountains of central Arkansas. The springs emerge in a gap between Hot Springs Mountain and West Mountain in an area about 1,500 feet (460 m) long by 400 feet (120 m) wide at altitudes from 576 to 683 feet (208 m). The springs predominantly are composed of hot water from thousands of feet underground mixed with some shallow cold ground water. Currently, there are 43 thermal springs in the park that are presumed to be flowing. Thermal water from 33 of the thermal springs is collected and monitored at a central reservoir, which distributes the combined discharge for public use and consumption. Rock types in the area include shale units which generally impede ground-water movement, while fractured chert, novaculite, and sandstone units generally support ground-water movement.^[10]

Conceptual diagram of thermal water flow.

The water comes from rain which falls in mountains to the north and northeast. Flowing downward through cracked rock at about one foot a year, the meteoric water migrates to estimated minimum depths of 4,500 to 7,500 ft (2,300 m) and achieves high temperatures in the deep section of the flow path before rising along fault and fracture conduits. Under artesian pressure, the thermal waters rise and emerge through the Hot Springs Sandstone between the traces of two thrust faults, along several northeast-trending lineaments. Some rainwater from near the springs mixes with the deep hot water before discharge. The trip down takes about 4,000 years while the hot water takes about a year to reach the surface.^[5]
The heat comes from the natural heating of rocks as depth increases. The composition of the water indicates it is heated rainwater which has not approached a magmatic source, so no volcanic action is involved in the formation of these hot springs. The result is the mildly alkaline, pleasant tasting solution with dissolved calcium carbonate.^[5]

[edit] Rock types

Remaining natural hot springs

The exposed rock types in the vicinity of the thermal springs are sedimentary rocks of Mississippian to Ordovician age, with the exception of younger igneous rocks (Cretaceous age) exposed in two small areas about 6 and 11 miles (18 km) southeast of the thermal springs (Potash Sulphur Spring and Magnet Cove, respectively), and in many small dikes and sills. Most dikes are less than 5 ft (1.5 m) wide. There have been 80 dikes noted about 4 miles (6.4 km) southeast of Hot Springs, on and near the Ouachita River. There is no indication that igneous rock occurs where the thermal springs discharge.
The sedimentary rocks in the vicinity of the thermal springs consist of shale, chert, novaculite, sandstone, and conglomerate.

The Stanley Shale is predominantly a clayey, thinly fissile, black to green shale, with large amounts of sandstone interbedded throughout the formation. The sandstone, when freshly exposed, is a hard, fine-grained, feldspathic, silty sandstone, but weathers easily to a soft, clayey porous material ranging from green to brown in color. Almost all of the low-lying areas in the city of Hot Springs are composed of the Stanley Shale, and it surrounds Hot Springs Mountain on the south, east, and west sides.
The Hot Springs Sandstone Member of the Stanley Shale, hereafter referred to as the Hot Springs Sandstone, consists of fine- to medium-grained sandstone with some shale and conglomerate. The sandstone is gray, hard and quartzitic, reaching thicknesses up to 6 ft (1.8 m) The shale predominantly occurs at the top of the unit, and the principal bed of the conglomerate occurs at the bottom.
The Arkansas Novaculite consists of lower, middle, and upper members. The lower member is a massive fractured novaculite, and is the dominant member on Hot Springs Mountain, with a thickness of about 275 ft (84 m) The middle member is a black clay shale interbedded with novaculite, about 10 ft (3.0 m) thick on Hot Springs Mountain. The upper member is chiefly a massive, highly calcareous light gray to black novaculite. It reaches a maximum thickness of 180 ft (55 m) in the area.
The Polk Creek Shale and Missouri Mountain Shale overlie the Bigfork Chert and generally consist of shale with minor thin layers of quartzitic sandstone. The Polk Creek Shale is a black, fissile, graphitic shale. The Missouri Mountain Shale varies in color, and is soft and argillaceous.
The Bigfork Chert overlies the Womble Shale and consists almost entirely of chert and silty chert in layers 2 to 12 inches (300 mm) thick, separated by minor thin beds of black shale. The chert is very brittle and intensely fractured from folding.
The Womble Shale is the oldest geologic unit that underlies all other exposed units. It is black, hard, and argillaceous shale.^[10]

During most of the Paleozoic Era, what became the Ouachita Mountains was the bottom of a shallow sea, where several sedimentary layers were created. About 500 million years ago a collision of the South American Plate with the North American Plate caused the shale and sandstone layers to fracture and fissure, creating mountains of the folded rocks.^[1] The thermal springs emerge from the plunging crest line of a large overturned anticline in the Zigzag Mountains of the Ouachita anticlinorium. The overturned anticline plunges toward the southwest into the Mazarn Basin. There are two recognized major thrust faults trending nearly parallel to fold axes that define the northern and southern limits of the thermal springs discharge area. The northern fault extends nearly parallel to Fountain Street northeastward about 9,200 ft (2,800 m) onto the southeast flank of North Mountain, and dips about 26 degrees north. At the northern extent of the thermal springs, this fault is suggested to form along the bedding contact of the Hot Springs Sandstone and Stanley Shale, with the Stanley Shale forming the hanging wall of the fault. The southern fault extends northeastward about 9,000 ft (2,700 m) roughly along the axis of the Hot Springs anticline, and dips about 44 degrees north. It has been proposed that a fault splits away from the southern fault, trends west and connects with the northern fault. A natural ravine trends along the location of this fault. Extensive cracks, joints, and fissures in the Bigfork Chert, Arkansas Novaculite, and the Hot Springs Sandstone allow the water to flow in the thermal springs area.^[10] Dissolved minerals in the water precipitate to form the white to tan travertine or "tufa rock" seen near the openings of the hot springs.^[1]

Accretionary Wedge #42- countertop geology

2012-01-27T15:51:00.001-06:00

Volcanoclast has put out the call for Accretionary Wedge 42 here .

   Normally I am the type of person that can make up her mind when it comes to decorating without any problems. I've remodeled homes and such before and have had no problem with the choices I've made as far as color schemes and furniture, etc it all seems to come together. Most contractors like me because I know what I want before I ever start and have everything picked out and all they have to do is just do the job.
Our kitchen was built back in the late sixties and looks it. Through the years I've had to replace most of the appliances in it due to them deteriorating so bad. Now I need a new stove and oven. My spouse is to the point of lets just go ahead and remodel the whole thing while we are at it because the counter top is an old Formica one that has not aged well.
At first I was all excited about that, until it came time to try to decide what counter top to use. We both agreed we wanted granite, but which one to use? I wanted them ALL. I couldn't decide on which one to go with they were all so interesting.   We left the place with the idea we would think upon it and that's what we did. I thought about it and thought about it and never could make up my mind.
    At one point I jokingly said, 'I wish I could have a sample of all of them and then make that into the counter top.'   My husband was dead set against that idea because he had grown up in a home that had had tile for the counter top and it seemed he spent his whole life cleaning the grout in that kitchen. He wanted a smooth top with as few seams as possible to clean. Another idea that came to mind was to go with concrete and then add in rock samples that I have collected over the years. That idea got nixed due to the fact that if I ever moved I wouldn't be able to take the counter with me. Also it would probably be a nightmare to keep clean too. So now I'm back to the problem of which one to go with.
   I decide to go in reverse order. Which one would I would not go with, but even that I had problems with them. All I know is that there is one I would definitely not use and that is the type that they call 'Black Granite' or I should say ' Gabbro'. Since my feelings about that one is so strong I'm going to write a little about why I won't use 'black Granite'.
The reason is my brother and his wife chose 'black granite' for their counter top. From the very moment I saw that one I fell in love with it and was very envious of it. At one point we had decided if we ever remodel our kitchen we would use that also.
   Then in 2009 my brother died, suddenly. My sister-in-law asked me to be with her when she made plans for the funeral and the burial spot. They had all these wonderful monument samples to choose from again. She was having problems choosing again until she saw the 'black granite' which just looked just like counter top in their kitchen. Instantly we both knew that was the one my brother would have chosen. She almost didn't get it because it was one of the more expensive ones there. I told her to go for it and not worry about it since whats a couple of hundred dollars in the long scheme of things. If that's what makes her happy then that's what she should go with. I was glad she decided to do that and it did turn out wonderful.

Now whenever I see 'black granite' I think of him. It brings too much heart ache to me. I could never use it as a counter top.
I also muse upon the fact that I would like to have 'black granite' as my tombstone too, because I'll be under it and not having to worry about looking at it.

Musings of a 90 year old

2012-01-18T15:52:00.000-06:00

A friend forwarded this to me. I'm not one to normally forward things on but this was something I thought was worth sharing.

Written by a 90 year old

This is something we should all read at least once a week!!!!! Make sure you read to the end!!!!!!

Written by Regina Brett, 90 years old, of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio .

"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most requested column I've ever written.

My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short – enjoy it.

4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and
family will.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don't have to win every argument. Stay true to yourself.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.

8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.

12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye But don't worry; God never blinks.

16.. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful. Clutter weighs you down in many ways.

18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

19. It's never too late to be happy. But it’s all up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't
save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important sex organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will
this matter?'

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive but don’t forget.

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.

35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd
grab ours back.

41. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have not what you need..

42. The best is yet to come...

43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

44. Yield.

45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

Its estimated 93% won't forward this. If you are one of the 7% who will,
forward this with the title '7%'.

I'm in the 7%. Friends are the family that we choose.

Fracking the Marcellus shale

2012-01-18T13:37:00.000-06:00

I was surfing the net and came across http://exploreshale.org/ while looking at Agile . This is a quick and easy presentation on fracking oil shales - namely the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. I liked the way they made it so any lay person could understand and follow how it is done.
When I went up to visit the Cleveland suburbs of Ohio, I could see a lot of work with oil and gas wells were being done around where I had grown up. I even got a photo, so of course I'm interested on what's being said since my mom still in the area.

The Cleveland shale with glacial sediments on top

Another Musing : I enjoy Agile a lot because they deal with geophysic type material. When I was in the Oil/Gas industry I would have loved to have access to the technical stuff they like to blog. I did take a course in the stuff they write about, years and years ago, so some of it I can actually understand what they are writing about. I keep on thinking if I ever get back into that area of geology this material that Agile writes about would be very beneficial to know so I try to follow it as much as I can.
.

Accretionary Wedge #41

2011-12-31T21:04:00.001-06:00

Ron has put out the call for AW #41 here.
What is the most memorable geologic experience I have witnessed????? I have a couple in mind and am thinking about which one to choose. I know if you live long enough you will experience quite a few of them like I have. I think the first that effected me the most was when Mount St Helen's blew her top. My dear friend Lockwood had just moved out there to Oregon and I was worried sick that he was affected by it. I was never so relieved as I was when he sent me a long letter telling me how wonderful the geology of Oregon was and this was before he decided to make geology his major. It's no wonder he decided to switch over after experiencing what he did. But to me that is his story to tell and not mine. So now I have to decide on something else.
I've felt two earthquakes, where I knew they were earthquakes but they were pretty minor events in the long run of things..

I've seen the Mississippi flooding and that is pretty impressive too and also scary when the place you are trying to get to is on the other side of the bridge.

I-20 bridge from Louisiana to Mississippi heading east.

Heading west.

The best photo of the extent of the flooding did not download.

Here's a different crossing of the Mississippi, taken a couple of months later where you can still see the effects of flooding in the area. I was heading west.

In this one we are traveling west about to cross the I155 bridge between Tennessee and Missouri.

I did see a tornado form and didn't even realize it at the time. I was shooting a video of a rainbow and the sunset and did a panoramic view and didn't even realize I had captured this. My husband was watching TV and called me to it. He said remember that storm we drove through on our way to Galveston? Well it spun off a tornado and here's the video of it on the weather channel. It touched down in Arcadia Louisiana. I decided to look at my video too and was shocked at what was on it.

But the most haunting by far was seeing the devastation of Katrina. I didn't actually get to see the area affected until it was a couple of years later. As we were traveling to New Orleans and were on the road to it I was so mesmerized by the total destruction of the area I was totally speechless. I thought I knew what to expect based on the news reports and such. I had read "The Control of Nature" by John McPhee and thought he had explained it so well. I had seen the aftermath of a tornado and the band of total destruction where nothing was left but toothpicks. I had even seen the aftermath of other hurricanes but nothing I had previously experience had prepared me for what I saw. I had never seen anything like that. It was mile after mile of nothingness - everything was gone. All I could think of at the time was this is how it must look after an atomic bomb has exploded. There was nothing green growing and there was a covering of dust/dirt over all of it. It was all totally destroyed. It also helped that I had driven the area numerous times and was familiar with a lot of the land marks that were now gone. It was so mind numbing I failed to take any pictures of it.   Now I wished I had but at the time all I could do was stare out the window trying to process it all. At the time I thought there's nothing to even try to take of a picture of because it was all gone. Why take a picture of nothing? It all became a blur because I started to cry since it was so devastating to me. I was just so glad when we got to the French quarter and at least there was some things that still looked familiar. I realized then that the French quarter was built where it was for a reason. It was the highest ground around in that area. No wonder it has lasted all these centuries.
   After that year we went back to the area each year. For a couple of years afterward it was still the same and it would still blow my mind to see it. One time I tried to take pictures but they did not turn out because of the speeds we were traveling. The stuff I wanted to get was all a blur. Each time I went after that I failed to take pictures because I was usually in the area for business reasons and didn't think to bring my camera. Then about the fifth year after Katrina the area started to look like it was coming back. Finally this past year it started to look like it used to but there were still areas where you could still see the destruction from it. Now I'm amazed at how rapidly it is recovering. Mother nature always amazes me.

Here's Wikipedia link on Huricaine_Katrina .
Now here's my impressions of that time when it actually did occur ( August 20 & September 2005).    I live in the Northwest corner of Louisiana.   The area is the third largest in the state as far as population goes. Naturally we were the place where a lot of the victims were evacuated to since the hurricane never made it that far. (In fact when Katrina did finally come through to us in the NW corner it was a nice gusty breeze - no rain which we did need at the time). Through out the city there were evacuation spots set up. In the past there had been other hurricanes where people had to evacuate and we thought we were ready for this one. We had practiced our drills and thought we knew how to set up and be prepared such an event. Boy were we naive. Within hours all the available spots were filled. They were scrambling to find other locations. Overnight our city had doubled in size.
   They started to call for donations. They wanted anything you could spare- food, water, clothing, cleaning supplies, bedding. I remember having just cleaned out my kids closets so we could have room for their new school cloths. (at that time I had a 18, 14 and 6 year old; non of which ever wore the same cloths, one was slim, one regular and the other was 8 years behind and I didn't like storing cloths for that long.) I had a huge pile all set to go to goodwill but as soon as I heard the call I decided to take it to the designated drop off center instead. I also decided I would do volunteer work there since I am a stay at home mom and that's what I do best - Volunteer my time with various organizations when I'm not helping with my husbands/ family business.
I'll never for get driving up to the Hirsh Coliseum and being stopped by security. They asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to volunteer helping with the evacuees. They asked me to show them my Red Cross training card. I did not have one, they were only having properly train people help volunteer with the evacuees at that time. I was very surprised by this since I had helped at other shelters before and that Red Cross training was never required. They were going to turn me away, when I told them that I had a trunkful of kids cloths - that they wanted. They told me to take it over to a certain drop off location but warned me not to interreact with the evacuees. I thought that such an odd request, but agreed to it.
   I went to the place to drop off the clothes. As we were unloading the boxes I had put them in, a bus pulled up filled with brand new evacuees. What I saw still stays with me to this day. They unloaded the people. The first thing I noticed was that none of them had shoes on. Their shoes had been taken from them because they all had been in the water and the water was filled with all sorts of contaminants. Most of them were also not properly dressed. I tried not to look or stare out of respect for them. But some of them you couldn't help but to notice the look of total hopelessness on their faces, faces I'll never forget. I had never seen faces like that before, the anguish and despair just tore my heart open. I wanted to help them but felt totally helpless. Now I knew why they only wanted trained volunteers. The big thing was knowing what to say to them and in most cases it was just keeping your mouth shut and let them do the talking. At that time there was no way they would let anyone take a picture- pictures would have derogated them, this way they still had their dignity.. Even though no pictures were taken the memory has never left me and will always haunt me.
    Later in the week they started to let non train people help serve food and do routine things for them. Different places would have areas set up where there was free food to be had. I helped serve food at the church I was attending at the time. They were all so grateful for everything that was being done for them. They would just thank you over and over and I felt embarrassed because I was just doing what was the right thing to do and know they would have done the same for me if the roles were reversed. I felt like I wasn't doing enough but I didn't know what else I could do?
Most of them left to stay with other family members as soon as they found a place where they could go. The ones that didn't went looking for housing, withing weeks most of the shelters were closed down.
    I remembered at the time we were trying to sell a house. It had been rent property and the tenants had just moved out. We were tired of renting it and put it on the market. As fate would have it, we had no offers for it so it sat there vacant. Our best friends ended up having his family come live with them. Having 9 extra people in their small house was driving them crazy. (Imagine all of your in-laws moving in on you unexpectedly with no date when they could move out.) To help them out we let his family live in that rent house for over 6 months, rent free, until they were finally able to move back to their homes in the New Orleans area. For some reason the house never sold with them in it - no one wanted to evict the hurricane evacuees. It was a hardship on us but it was one we could afford and bear and was nothing compared to what they had gone through. At least I finally felt like I was helping out in a small way.
   I remembered having the family over for dinner a couple of times and then they inviting us to eat with them. We would listen to their story of their ordeal. They would tell it over and over but it was always fascinating to hear because there was always some other perspective that they remembered but at first thought was unimportant compared to the magnitude of the other stuff.. Maybe some day I'll write it down but right now its too long to tell.
   I do remember the frustration they had with getting federal help. When they got up to their family in our town all they had with them was the cloths that they had on that day. They lost everything. My friends momma only had a pair of slippers to wear for days.   How do you prove you have what you have and insurance and all that other stuff if all of your papers and pictures are destroyed? They were just so grateful that they got out alive because at one point they almost got trapped by the water. And that's what struck me the most was how grateful they were, and how thankful they made us feel for having what we had and being able to share it with them. I just wished I could have done more for others, but at least I knew we did what we could at that time.

    Right now I saw in the paper the other day that the federal government was suing some people that got paid too much money from the disaster relief fund due to their incompetency. I can't tell you how angry that makes me. Those people needed every single cent they got. They had to start over with everything. I can't believe the government is trying to get it back. It was their mistake and they can afford to loose it more than those poor victims. 3-4,000 is nothing to government but it is everything to those victims. If it was up to me I would have it docked from the idiots pay that made those mistakes. They never had to suffer like those people did that lost everything.

Now I muse upon when and where the next disaster will fall. Will I be prepared? I'm just grateful that Louisiana made it through another hurricane season without a major one hitting its shores. I'm grateful I live where I do and don't have to worry as much about the hurricanes as much as the southern part of my state does. I just wonder where the next one will hit.

My Interest in Other Things

2011-11-17T14:39:00.000-06:00

This post is not going to be geologic related stuff but on my other things. For over 50 years I had to entertain myself without using the internet. Needless to say I've developed some hobbies and interest that have kept me busy all these years. Geology has always been my main love but living up north with the snow I couldn't always go outside or do things outside for very long. I had to find other things to do during the winter time.
My main form of entertainment was reading. I came by that naturally since my mom was a grade school librarian, (also my sister and my brother-in-law are both librarians too.) I grew up in a house were my mom would be making dinner and reading a book and that book was not a cookbook but a best seller. She'd have it propped on the counter as she would mix ingredients together. I could never figure out how she ever mastered that technique because whenever I try reading my cookbook to cook something I get all sorts of ingredients into it. Also in our house we only had one TV for the longest time. Most of the time I didn't care for what was being watched. Since my mom was a librarian we'd have books all over the house. I'd much rather go and curl up with a good book and be entertained for hours by reading it. My favorite genre is science fiction.
I was a middle child in a big family. Most of the time I was left alone to do my own thing. The only person who really took an interest in me was my mom's mom. She lived about 2 miles away and when I got older I was allowed to go visit her. In fact I was encouraged to visit her since she was house bound and couldn't drive a car. My grandma believed that idle hands were the devil workshop and so she decided I needed to learn how to do certain things. First and foremost she made sure I knew how to sew. For that I will always be grateful to her.
Next she decided I needed to learn how to embroider. I was about seven years old and she thought I could handle that. She used to be a school teacher in a one room school house and was very good at instructing you and then leaving you be to master it on your own. She would only help you when you ran into a major problem that would keep a piece from being finished. If it was something minor she would say 'Leave it, every hand made piece needs to have at least one mistake in it so that people know its hand made - otherwise they will think it came from a store.' That was some of the best advice I ever got. It allowed me to make minor mistakes in my stuff and not have everything perfect. But don't get me wrong even though she wouldn't get upset with one tiny mistake she would not let you have a lot of mistakes either. I would hate it when she would look at something and say 'You can do better than that'. She would undo what I did and then hand it back to me to do it better. Here's the first piece I ever embroidered. It's a pillow case.

After she taught me embroidering she taught me to crochet with a single needle. I don't have anything from when she did teach me. It was mostly dollies and edging for the pillow cases. But knowing how to crochet later in life I did crochet a couple of major pieces. The first was an afghan.

(Please excuse the shape of it. I used to have a dog that when he'd get nervous with thunderstorm he'd hide under it. Then he developed the bad habit of sucking on it. Needless to say he started to put wholes in it and I ended up putting it in storage thinking one day I'd get around to fixing it. Trouble is the colors in my house are no longer in that color scheme and I didn't have a lot of motivation to get it fixed.)

Here is the second one. I did this one using an afghan hook and stitch. You were suppose to embroider on top, but I was lazy and thought it would be faster just to change the colors of the thread and just crochet the colors in. It took some experimentation but I eventually figured it out. I was pleased with the way it did turn out. Can you guess what team my husband was a fan of at the time.

Blogger wont let me download the picture of it on the bed. I have it on a queen size bed. But here is a closer look of it where you can see I crochet in the colors.

After I mastered crocheting she moved me onto Knitting. At first I mostly did scarves. But then I eventually moved up to other more complicated things like hats and mittens. I have nothing from that time. But I still to occasionally like to knit. I've had some on going projects for years. My children wanted to have an afghan like my husband had. I prefer to knit. I was so happy to find that they now make needles were you can have your knitting as long as you want it to. I was able to knit afghans for two of them and am working on a third one for my youngest son. I usually like to work on it when I watch TV. I don't watch a lot of TV so these projects are taking a lot longer than I had planned on them to take. (Because blogger is messing up with what it will include and the order of things I'll show you what blogger will let me have.)

The completed one on my son's twin size bed.

I am from Irish descent and so was she. She was very proud of it and made sure I was proud of it too. My grandmother made sure I knew how to knit like the Irish do. In my day's of living up north I've made a lot of sweaters but they were always given away as gifts. Now I don't do many because living in the south there is no need for heavy sweaters like there is up there. I don't have any of those sweaters to show but I do have these swatches. Before I would knit a sweater I would always make a sample piece using the patterns I had picked out. It would give me a gauge of how big it would run and how many stitches I would need to add to the needles. (At the top is a piece that I was working on for my mother-in-law when she died. She was only 80 lbs at the time and tinnie, tiny. I never finish that piece because I didn't know anyone else that small to give it to. Since then I forgot what size needles I was using or the pattern. I keep it as a reminder of my love for her.)

Each design represents something. One is the tree of life - my you have a long life. Another is a heart and that is my you love last a long time. Another one is a symbol for money - may you have lots of it and a different one is for wisdom. I can't remember all that these were suppose to represent. I wish I had my grandmother here to tell me what they mean again..

One of the last thing my grandmother taught me how to do was to quilt. Quilting was her least favorite thing to do and so she was not into it very much. But she did attempt to show me. I guess I picked up on that but it never really stuck with me. That was something I had to learn on my own. And the reason being was when I was in high school she decided I needed to make a hope chest. I started this piece of embroidery for my bed. My family used to joke about it since I worked on it so infrequently. They said I would never get married at the rate I was working on it. And in a way they were right I didn't get married for the first time until I was just months shy of 30. The piece was embroidered by then but it wasn't quilted. Later I had to take a class and join a quilting club to find out how to quilt it, but I did do it and here it is.

All of this was to lead up to the main purpose of this post. I haven't been doing a lot of blogging lately simply because I've been involved with other things like the pumpkin patch ( here ) (Now I'll see what blogger is going to let me down load so I can figure out what to write about. - I can't stand the way blogger is being so picky about which images it will let me down load.)

One of the things I'm doing is working on another quilt. I got this quilt kit years ago. I was remodeling my house and saw it and thought that this would be perfect for my bed. I bought it but then my sewing machine broke and I stopped sewing for awhile. The sewing bug got me and I got a new machine only it was so complicated I didn't enjoy working on it. I had to wait a couple of years later to afford a simpler one that was more to my style of sewing. The other one I gave to a textile art major that was thrilled to get it. Its taken me awhile to get around to it but I finally am. Here's what I've done so far.

The other hobby that I have that I love to do and takes mega amount of time is to weave. In September/ October I usually have demonstrations to give at various places because there is usually a break in the weather. Some of the events I've gone to are Colonial Days, Red River Revel, Family days at the State museum and Pioneer days@ LSUS. I've gotten some table top looms for these events so that I can transport them easily and they have to be set up for those demonstrations since most people don't like to see you warping the looms (besides it takes too much concentration power to do it while you are being constantly interrupted - its best to do it at home w/ relatively peace & quiet.)
So now I'm going to see what loom images blogger will let me use. This really is getting old and frustrating.

This is my newest loom. Isn't it a beauty. Its got four harnesses. Look at the stuff I can do on it!! This is a modified chevron pattern.

Here's my inkle loom . This gives you a different type of weave since the warp threads wrap around the weft.

Here's a very simple basic one that gives a tabby or twill weave.

Here's my inkle again with a different project on it. Look at how complicated it is. Each thread has to be threaded individually. Needless to say it takes a lot of time and patients to thread a loom. I do it because it is such a lost art and I feel children need to see how cloths were made before modern machines could make them.

And the final thing I worked on was making beaded jewelry from the material I had gotten at the gem & mineral show ( here ). Here's just a few that I made. Most of the time when I was making them I tried to keep someone in mind as I would make them. I would try to picture that person wearing them. This blue ended up being given to a friend of mind with blue eyes.

Like when I was doing this one I thought of Silver Fox being in the dessert and What she would wear.

Or this one - I thought of Anne Jefferson.

And this one was for Evelyn at Geonerys.

I had some with other people in mind like Dana and Jessica but they didn't get down loaded.

With the necklaces I make them to be given away at Mardi Gras time and for gifts. I now muse upon when I can give some of these away. I'm hoping that maybe someday I'll meet up with a few of the geobloggers so that I can give them one a set of beads.

Now you can see why I've not been blogging much and geology isn't the only thing I'm musing upon.

Accretionary Wedge #40 - Geo-Pumpkins

2011-11-05T10:45:00.002-05:00

Michael Klaas put out a call for Geo-Pumpkins here. And here's the finished Accretionarly Wedge #40.
To be honest I really wasn't in the mood to carve a pumpkin since I've been around them for a month, selling them to give the proceeds to local charities. I was in charge of the discovery center and for a week I talked about pumpkins to 3 - 5 year olds. I had about 2500 students come by. Its lots of fun to see their reactions and I find it very rewarding.
I decided to do something very simple. I had a little baseball pumpkin that I decided to use. He had been tossed around and I was surprised he had not cracked open. I thought of him being as hard as a geode. It just made sense to turn him into a geode.

Geode Pumpkin

(I am having a lot of trouble down loading images. Geode pumpkin took more than one try and two different images, I had moved on to another image when it up this one up, of the baseball pumpkin next to a geode.)

I did show the pumpkin patch here with one of the unusual pumpkins.

This was the sign I used to show how a pumpkin grows. It also showed some of the world record pumpkins. The largest was 1810.5 lbs grow by Chris Stevens of New Richmond WI on 10-9-2010, and also the world record largest pumpkin pie 3,699 lbs baked in New Bremen Ohio.

I'm going to include some of the pumpkins I had the kids see and touch. I thought that they were all pretty interesting.
So here are my pumpkin friends that I would show.
The first one got called Casper the ghost since he was all white. Geode pumpkin is right next to him, before he metamorphosis into geode pumpkin. He could be considered to be chalk since he is so white.

I called this one ~~dendritic~~ I mean trellis because of the way the color was channeled on him reminding of that type of drainage. Here's another view of him.

This was shale pumpkin since it looked like shale. Here's another view of it.

This one I called serpentine since it was mostly green. also it had that zone where it looked like it had been metamorphized into the color it was. This pumpkin had definitely undergone some usual processes for it to end up the way it did.
( This is really frustrating its not downloading what I want it to and is taking repeated attempts to get anything and when I do get it its not in the order I want it.)

Lava pumpkin

And this pumpkin would get the most reaction with a oh yeak!! I didn't know what to call it. Maybe this should be my conglomerate pumpkin.

Here's my square pumpkin I used when I would read about Spookley the Square pumpkin.

Now I muse upon what pumpkins I'll have next year. Because they are always so different and varied.

Accretionary Wedge # 39 - Dress Barbie like a geologist

2011-10-31T16:32:00.003-05:00

The AW call has been made by Evelyn Geonery's . She wants us to dress our Barbies or Ken's as geologist.
I'm having trouble down loading images with Blogger right now so I don't know if I'll be able to post my image or not. But thinking about Barbie's has brought back some memories that I'm going to first share instead.

When I started kindergarten in the fall of 1960 all of my new friends seemed to have Barbie Dolls. They had recently come out and were very popular. I started to want one. So for Christmas I asked Santa for a Barbie Doll along with a couple of other things. I got a Baby Doll instead. I came from a large family and Santa only brought us one gift and my parents would give us cloths. I knew that was all I was getting for Christmas.
   I had to wait for my birthday. My birthday came in September and I didn't speak up and say what I wanted. Again I knew I would only get one gift. We had had a fire in our house that year and my bed was destroyed in the fire. I got a new bed for my birthday gift - it wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I knew it was all my parents could give me. It was more important for me to have a good bed to sleep in than it was to have toys. I had to swallow my tears and accept things for the way they were. I would wait for Christmas.
   I decided I would ask Santa again for a Barbie. Instead I got a stuffed, pink, musical Teddy Bear that I called Hunter because of the hunter green cloths she had on when I got her. She played 'Rock a by a baby in a tree top,' I loved that Teddy more than anything else and had her for many a year. She finally disintegrated away from being loved raw because she was held so much. She was a lot better gift than a Barbie doll because I could snuggle and sleep with her, she was my best friend and constant companion. I figured Santa really knew that teddy bear was a better toy for me. My parents did surprise me and gave me a toy sewing basket instead of cloths. (I didn't play with that sewing basket much until I finally did get my Barbie. I would spend hours sewing cloths for her and that started a love of sewing that has lasted to this day.)
   I had to wait for my birthday to try again for a Barbie. I figured out that I probably wouldn't get one from my parents but had better luck if I got one from a friend. I had gone to a couple of my friends parties and the most popular gift given was a Barbie doll. So I asked for a birthday party instead of a present. My mom was reluctant at first but then gave in and I had my birthday party. I had about 8 friends show up. I got Barbie outfits but no Barbie. Everyone there had assumed I had already gotten a Barbie since most of them were already owning more than one Barbie by that time. What they wanted most now was the cloths for her, so they gave me what they wanted to get not what I wanted. I didn't mind so much because I could bring the cloths to my friends houses and I could still play dress up with their Barbies. But it just wasn't the same as having my own Barbie to play with. I wanted a Barbie more than anything else.
By then I was becoming more and more of a tomboy since I enjoyed playing outside so much. Since I had so few toys, I discovered the wonders of nature. I found there were things outside that could keep me entertained for hours and hours. There was always something new and exciting to see. I started to pick up rocks and see how different they could be. But I still was a child and wanted toys to play with too. So I had to wait for Christmas to try again.
   This Christmas it was going to be different. I decided since Santa only gave me one toy I would make sure he knew I just wanted a Barbie and nothing else. That was all that I put on my list - 'BARBIE'. That was all I asked for. I thought surely he would understand since I had just the said the one thing that was what I wanted. Instead I got a Madame Alexander doll - 'Beth' from the Little Womens' series. Beth was beautiful and a whole lot more expensive than a Barbie doll, but she just wasn't a Barbie. I took her and put her in my toy drawer and basically only pulled her out when I couldn't go outside to play. (I found out years and years later, the reason my mom gave me that doll was because she had always wanted one. Since I didn't play very often with dolls unlike my sisters, she knew I would keep it in good condition. I still have her and my other Little Women dolls I had gotten as I got older, they sit in a box in the closet - nothing much has changed.)
Getting back to Barbie, by then I figured out that no one was ever going to give me a Barbie. The only way I was ever going to get one was I would have to go out and buy one. I had gotten a dollar from my grandmother for Christmas. I went to the store to get one and found out that they cost $2.99. I was seven years old and realize if I just waited for Christmas and birthday money it would be years before I would have enough money saved up to get one. I had to figure out a way to get the money sooner. I asked how I could get money and was told I could earn it.
Back then in our neighborhood you could recycle glass bottles. You could get 1 to 5 cents for them depending on their size. Most were about 3 cents. I remember taking our families red wagon to my neighbors houses and asking them for their glass bottles. No one was willing to give me any until one elderly neighbor asked me why he should give me his bottles when they were worth money to him too. I was very disappointed and started walking away until he called me back. He told me he would work out a deal with me. If I took the bottles to the store for him he would let me keep one cent for every bottle I took. One cent was so much better than nothing and I readily agreed to do it. I found that solution worked well with some of the other elderly neighbors as well. It took about about a year for me to get the money together since they would only let me come by every couple of weeks, but eventually I did get the money together.
It was one of my happiest days of my childhood when I was finally able to go to the store to buy my Barbie. I had the 2.99 saved up, only problem was no one had ever told me about taxes. She really wasn't $2.99 but $3.03. I was not able to get her at that time. It really tore me up as I had to put her back on the shelf since the sales lady wouldn't budge on the taxes and my mom just wouldn't give in and cover it. I had to go and earn the four cents more.
Finally I was able to get one. At the time, I had blond hair and blue eyes. I wanted the one that looked like me that I had picked out earlier. She was no longer there. I had to settle on one that was a brunette and blue eyes, like my sisters. She just didn't grab my heart like the first one. I got her home and played with her all day. But after a couple of days playing with her, she was boring and not near as much fun as I had envisioned her to be. I like my outside nature 'toys' so much better. I would only play with her when the weather was bad. Most of my playing with her consisted of me sewing clothes for her.
   Most of the time she just sat in my toy drawer. Then one day my younger sister was home sick and decided to play with her. She cut her hair to make her look like her. She was ruined to me and I gave her to my sister since it was so obvious she wanted her. I was hardly ever playing with her by then and it made no sense to me to keep her. My sister loved playing with dolls and was doing it all the time, she was overjoyed to get her. She treasured her so much more than I ever did and it made me feel good to know that she was with a better mama than I was ever going to be with her. I never played with or had any other interest in Barbies again. I ended up having three sons and never had a reason to get another one.
    Now this Accretionary Wedge is to dress a Barbie up as a geologist. Needless to say I had to go out and buy one. I was amazed that after 50 years I could get one for $5.47 at Walmart. I thought for sure they would be more expensive than that. Well I wasn't so totally off by that -- there were some collector ones that were in the 75 dollar range and there were some fancy ones in the 25 range, yet I was still able to get one like I had always dreamed of getting for just $5.47. She came with just the basic swim wear stuff just like my first one.

   Now I muse upon the fact that even though I never played much with Barbies she did teach me so many things. She started me in the habit of recycling items my whole life. She made me aware of the environment and how fragile it is. She taught me how to work and earn some money. She taught me how to save my money so that I can get the things that I want. She taught me about taxes, a lesson I never forgot after that. She made me realize Santa wasn't real. She created a love for sewing in me. She taught me the joy in giving things to others.
   Barbie, also made me realize that growing up in middle class America I should be satisfied with all that that I did have. All I really needed was the basics to live - food on the table, a relatively safe shelter over my head, a few cloths to wear and a warm bed to sleep in. Anything more than that was a blessing and should be something to be valued, treasured and appreciated to its fullest and not taken for granted. For the record I never considered my family poor. I grew up in the suburbs of middle class America, with hard working parents that paid their taxes and made sure our basic needs were met. There was very little money left over for other things like toys. I was grateful for all that they could give me. My family was very typical of those in my neighborhood and we all considered ourselves very fortunate to live where we did. (I love the USA). To me that was being middle class. Besides what could be more middle class than that - to own a Barbie, which I did?
I'm sure there are other things she taught me too but right now I can't think of them.

Now for her Accretionary Wedge debut.
Miss AW-39 from LA.
Gold Digger Barbie

She can't tell the difference from galena which she is resting on top or or copper which she is leaning against. All she did find was fools gold, just like me.

Now that she's all pooped out - here she is doing what geologist seem to do best.

Hold a beer! Look how revived she looks.

PS here is what she looked liked before the rock hounding hit her.

(addendum 1-27-12 I went home for Christmas and brought back some old family photo's that I've been scanning into the computer for my family and guess what I found? A picture of me playing with my sewing material and me making cloths for my doll from that Christmas.)

2 calls for the Accretionary Wedge

2011-10-28T23:07:00.003-05:00

Dana over at En Tequila Es Verdad
posted the call that is shown below. I was wondering if we were going to have a Accretionary Wedge for this month. Imagine my surprise to find out there's two call for posts. I'm grateful she posted this information. Now I have to get to it.
I'm debating how much trouble I should go to since I've had so much trouble with Blogger this week and have been avoiding it so that I don't destroy my computer. Also I've been working in the pumpkin patch and haven't had time to get on the computer very much.

I might not get to carving a pumpkin - I'm kind of sick of them right now because I've been working with them since the first week of Oct. But I can share a pumpkin I worked with over the last couple of weeks that got the kids going - oooh yuck. So now I'm going to try to see if Blogger will let me include the image.

This is so frustrating. It didn't include the first image of the pumpkin I wanted but it did include the one I wanted of the patch itself. And it did include another image that I thought would be good to include also.

Pumpkin patch

Here's another 'yuk' pumpkin. This one will be kind of hard to carve, but its interesting and goolish in its own right and really doesn't need anything done to it.

Unusual looking pumpkin

As for the Barbie stuff I'm musing on that since I've never been one to own or play with Barbies. I was always more interested in collecting and looking at rocks and playing in mud holes.

Accretionary Wedge: Deadlines Fast Approaching!

October 28, 2011 at 4:35 am Dana Hunter

The Accretionary Wedge carnival’s starting November with two back-to-back kinda-Halloween-themed, um, themes. Posts are due soon, so you’d best scramble if you’re planning to wedge yourself in.
(Please forgive that last little joke. I know it wasn’t funny. I’m functioning on fractional amounts of sleep just now, and I think my sense of humor went to bed without me.)
Deadline November 1st: Dress Barbie Like a Geologist! Or any sort of scientist, really. And it doesn’t have to be a Barbie. In fact, since I haven’t got a doll, I might be doing a doll’s house sort of thing, if I can get my crap together. Those of you with children, or who have friends or relatives with children: steal a doll away from their toy chest. Rip it from their chubby little hands if you must! Sure, they’ll weep now, but wait until you return their dolly all scienced up. They’ll not only have the most awesome doll on the block, they’ll have inspiration for a future career doing something much more interesting than standing about in implausibly high heels in a shocking pink house with a horrid pink car in the driveway.
Deadline November 7th: Geo-Pumpkins! You were going to carve a pumpkin for Halloween anyway, right? Make it geo-riffic! You don’t even have to have a blog of your own for this one – Michael will host your pics for you.
Instructions for submissions are at the links above. Get crack-a-lackin’!

Is anyone having problems with Blogger?

2011-10-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

I went to get on this blog and decided to check my stats. I haven't been on for a while because I've been busy with other things. I noticed I was getting an unusual large amounts of hits (I should say large for me but small for most of you since I get so few visitors) on a degree of mine I had posted part of when I was talking about some certificates I've gotten through the years... I went to check it out and as I read the blog I noticed the very 1st image was missing - the reason for the post. I looked at the rest of the post and noticed other things were missing too and I had not removed them. I decided to go ahead and remove them since I was uncomfortable about the way things were being tampered with this post. I thought it was a problem with just that one post and went on to catch up with some blogs I like to follow and didn't look at any other posts of mine.
I just was able to get back on this blog again. I started to look at things and I've realized just about every post I have, has some missing images. This is so sickening to me- just the thought of all the time and effort I went to upload and post them. Trying to remember what what was used and should be there. Should I go to the effort to replace them or what? What really gets to me is that most of the images that are missing are the ones that attract people to this blog. It's like someone has deliberately blocked my most popular images. Is this a virus? Was I deliberately sabotaged or iss it due to something else. I feel so frustrated about this - Should I give up on blogging?
IS ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE HAVING MISSING IMAGES ON THEIR BLOGS OR SIMILAR PROBLEMS WITH THEIR BLOG? DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW I CAN GET THIS FIXED?

This Blog is now 1 year old

2011-10-05T13:55:00.000-05:00

Today is this blogs first anniversary.
As you can see I wouldn't have many viewers if it wasn't for the Accretionary Wedge and for that I want to thank the people that thought up AW and have kept it going. I have enjoyed participating in it.

Here's the most viewed items.

ACCRETIONARY WEDGE 32 -CALL TO POST

Feb 8, 2011, 19 comments

1,563 Pageviews

Accretionary Wedge - 29: What Geologic feature abo...

Dec 1, 2010, 4 comments

820 Pageviews

ACCRETIONARY WEDGE# 32

Mar 8, 2011, 4 comments

204 Pageviews

Call to Post - Accrectionary Wedge #29

Nov 7, 2010, 6 comments

172 Pageviews

Hodges Gardens State Park, LA

Jun 2, 2011,

116 Pageviews

No place like home

Mar 20, 2011,

116 Pageviews

Accretionary Wedge 28

Oct 25, 2010, 1 comment

109 Pageviews

Crepe Myrtle

Jun 4, 2011,

92 Pageviews

AW-34 Weird Geology

May 13, 2011, 2 comments

88 Pageviews

Bake Sale -- Accretionary Wedge- 30

Jan 21, 201, 1

73 Pageviews

I also need to thank Lockwood over at Outside the Interzone. We used to be friends and I found him again through facebook back in Aug 2009. From his facebook page I discovered his blog. Through his blog I discovered the geoblogshpere. Through the geoblogsphere I found the Accretionary Wedge.
   Up until then I had never been much on the computer, I always had too many other things going on.   But once I discovered the geoblogsphere I got hooked on viewing the various blogs. I have a tendency to stick to the blogs that are active in the Accretionary Wedge. Over the last couple of years I feel like these blogs authors have become my friends. I love to read about all the wonderful things they are studying/ viewing/ thinking about -- I liked being able to be connected to geology again. Geology has always been a love of mine and I had gotten away from it for various reasons. It was nice to find other people who like geology as much as I do.

    I also need to thank Silver Fox - she was the one who finally convinced me that I needed to have a blog. At first I didn't think I would want to post anything but then, I started to get into it and found out I did like doing it.
   I know I'm not the best writer. I tell my kids you have to practice if you ever want to get good at something and writing post does give me some practice. It also makes me realize how much I've not used over that last 30 years since I've been out of college. Now a days I have very little reason to write, but feel like it is an important skill to have. This blog does help me with that.
   And I know my geology is very rusty since I've been out of the field for close to 20 years and have forgotten a lot. Its amazing how when you don't work with something a lot how quickly you do forget stuff. Yet at the same time I am amazed that I do recall some of the stuff I do. I like being able to go back and look at that stuff again. But that's why I thing the geoblogsphere is so great. I can refresh my memory and get update with what others are writing about. I like the way it lets me explore so many different areas - areas that I may not have been able to study in great detail before.
I think it is so marvelous the way we can share images like we now can do. I remembered when I got into the geology there were very few photographic images. Most of the the things were hand drawn and written about. Sometime you think you understand what is being discussed but then when you would see it in person it would make more sense to you. With the images that are now shared it is another step along that line of helping you understand things better. Although I must admit, to me, nothing beats going out to the outcrop itself and seeing the material first hand.

    I decided to do this blog because my kids wanted me to get into the 21st century and become computer literate. I thought if I could figure out how a blog works that would be a step along that line. Like how to import links and images. The funny thing about computers is that I used to be really into them back when I had more time to work with them. I had a Commodore 64 (that 64 was for 64 Kilobytes of memory) in the early 1980's. Then in the 90's I had a PC, and then a PC 286 and a PC 486 and a finally a pentium laptop. After a while I got tired of always having to learn how a new system worked. I got tired having to deal with adobe reader problems and not working with other things. I got tired of dealing with viruses and other computer glitches. I didn't have the time to relearn all this stuff and got to the point I just settled with what I had. Unfortunately what I had didn't have internet capability and thus that is how I got so out of date. This blog was to get me into it again and it did do that job.

I like having a blog because it let me keep other blogs that I like to follow in one spot. It makes it easy to check up on them because I can see when new post are out. At first I tried to connect with email feeds but I don't like that because of all the stuff that goes there and then having to plow through it all when I just want to find out what my meetings and such are. By having that feature I can go to them when I have time to really look at them and enjoy them.
    I also like the fact that I could keep my trips and such in one spot too. I do have some post that I have not published - like my Ohio U reunion in Athens, Oh; a trip to Fort Smith, Jackson Ms, and Toledo Oh, that I may publish or may not but its nice to have them in one spot so if I want to post them I can ..

    One of the main reasons I wanted to get involved is because I wanted to connect to other people. I wanted to meet people that liked Geology too. I am a little disappointed I just had two followers for the year - Dan and Meg. I want to thank you two for making that connection, I really did appreciate that. Because my followers were so few and it was discouraging to me to see it I decided to go ahead and remove that feature from my blog.
The good thing is I do know there are some people that follow me regularly through the All-Geo website and will look at my stuff that way. I should also thank the people at the All-Geo website that do pass on my post to others.
   And finally I feel like I have made a friend through Dana Hunter @ En Tequila Es Verde. I just love the way she writes - she has so much enthusiasm about it. I'm glad she's channeled her talents to describing geologic items. She gives me inspiration as to how I can improve my writing.

I know this blog isn't as popular as some of the other blogs out there. I sometimes wonder why I bother with it. But to me its my stuff and Dana has encouraged me to keep after it if I'm only doing it for myself. Who knows maybe someday it may uplift or give someone some pleasure when they wanted something to take there minds off of their own troubles. I know the geoblogsphere was there for me when I really needed it the most to help deal with my brothers death. There were many a night I would escape into those blogs and got so much comfort from them when I was try to get over my grief of my loss. I loved the way they got me thinking about other things that had nothing to do with my life. I'm just grateful I now have a place I can escape to when I need to get a break from things.

Accretionary Wedge -38 Back to school

2011-09-30T21:24:00.000-05:00

Anne Jefferson put out the call for post for the Accretionary Wedge -38

here

This got me thinking about things. I would have been a professional student if I had enough money to stay in school. Unfortunately my money gave out when I finished my masters. I decided to go to work for a couple of years and then head back to academia and try for a PhD. But along the way my plans got waylaid and I never did get my PhD in geology.
While I was in school there were always some geology course being offered that I felt I just had to have to be a well rounded geologist and ended up taking those instead of other elective classes. At the same time I would sign up for the geology classes, my dad was always after me to take some business courses and asked me why I hadn't gotten into the courses he wanted me to take. Since I was paying my own way I thought I knew what was best for me. I was going on the advice of my geology professors. Besides it was too inconvenient for me to take those business courses. They were in a different college and you had to get special permission to be in them. I didn't want to go through all the trouble of getting all those forms signed ect...   In the long run I never did take the business courses when my dad wanted me to take them.
    After I graduated I wished I had listened to him. The first thing my company did was to encourage me to go back to school and to get a Masters in Business Administration (MBA). They were a business and they wanted everyone who worked for them to know how a business operated. Having an MBA was important to them and I quickly realized that if I wanted to have career with them I needed to go back to school and round out my education in the areas were I was lacking.
Well guess what to get a MBA you first have to have the basic business courses. I needed those business courses now. So I was back in school taking the require curriculum to get a business degree which I needed so I could obtain a MBA. After awhile I did drop out of my classes because I found working on wells and going to school don't necessarily agree with each other. I had to drop everything when I got caught on a well for over a month and missed my midterms exams.
   Later I was able to go back to school and I did take all the course work so I could become a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). I thought being a CPA would be more beneficial for me than a MBA since more people had MBA's but very few had a masters in geology and were also CPA's. I never did take the CPA exam for personal reasons, but I did use all of my accounting background. They were especially helpful to have when my husband went to work for himself and I could do his books from our home. The biggest benefit was the flexible hours and being able to be there for my kids when they had school activities that needed parental involvement.
In the end I was glad I went the accounting route since that kept me working during the oil bust of the late 80's when you couldn't find work as a geologist in the oil industry. Just about everyone I knew who was a geologist at that time ended up having to change careers. - very few of them were able to keep gainfully employed as geologists and most of those did it as independent contractors/consultants. I did try to be an independent contractor for awhile, but as time went on I did less consulting and concentrated more on my husbands business since I couldn't generate enough business on my own and his was really taking off.

So now all I have to say to geology students out there is this: try to get as much business background as you can because if you want to work as a geologist you have to know basic things about the business. If nothing else you should be able to analyze their income statement and balance sheet to make sure they are a viable company to work for. If you go into academia you still need to know how to make a budget, and write grants - its all about the cash flow.

Joining the Banned Books Week Meme

2011-09-26T17:48:00.000-05:00

Dana Hunter had this post at En Tequila Es Verdad.

Banned Books Week Meme

It's that time o' the year again, that joyous and irreverent turning up our ink-stained noses at the fools who think banning books is a good idea. Time for a meme, wouldn't you say?

I got this handy list of the most frequently-challenged books 2000-2009 from the American Library Association's website. I've highlighted the ones I've read in bold. Feel free to do the same, my darlings - and do treat yourself to some delicious literary contraband this week.

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Myracle, Lauren
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
11. Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers
12. It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie Harris
13. Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey
14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
15. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
16. Forever, by Judy Blume
17. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
18. Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous
19. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
20. King and King, by Linda de Haan
21. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
22. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
23. The Giver, by Lois Lowry
24. In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak
25. Killing Mr. Griffen, by Lois Duncan
26. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
27. My Brother Sam Is Dead, by James Lincoln Collier
28. Bridge To Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson
29. The Face on the Milk Carton, by Caroline B. Cooney
30. We All Fall Down, by Robert Cormier
31. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
32. Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
33. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson
34. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler
35. Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging, by Louise Rennison
36. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
37. It’s So Amazing, by Robie Harris
38. Arming America, by Michael Bellasiles
39. Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane
40. Life is Funny, by E.R. Frank
41. Whale Talk, by Chris Crutcher
42. The Fighting Ground, by Avi
43. Blubber, by Judy Blume
44. Athletic Shorts, by Chris Crutcher
45. Crazy Lady, by Jane Leslie Conly
46. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
47. The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, by George Beard
48. Rainbow Boys, by Alex Sanchez
49. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
50. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
51. Daughters of Eve, by Lois Duncan
52. The Great Gilly Hopkins, by Katherine Paterson
53. You Hear Me?, by Betsy Franco
54. The Facts Speak for Themselves, by Brock Cole
55. Summer of My German Soldier, by Bette Green
56. When Dad Killed Mom, by Julius Lester
57. Blood and Chocolate, by Annette Curtis Klause
58. Fat Kid Rules the World, by K.L. Going
59. Olive’s Ocean, by Kevin Henkes
60. Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
61. Draw Me A Star, by Eric Carle
62. The Stupids (series), by Harry Allard
63. The Terrorist, by Caroline B. Cooney
64. Mick Harte Was Here, by Barbara Park
65. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
66. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred Taylor
67. A Time to Kill, by John Grisham
68. Always Running, by Luis Rodriguez
69. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
70. Harris and Me, by Gary Paulsen
71. Junie B. Jones (series), by Barbara Park
72. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
73. What’s Happening to My Body Book, by Lynda Madaras
74. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
75. Anastasia (series), by Lois Lowry
76. A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
77. Crazy: A Novel, by Benjamin Lebert
78. The Joy of Gay Sex, by Dr. Charles Silverstein
79. The Upstairs Room, by Johanna Reiss
80. A Day No Pigs Would Die, by Robert Newton Peck
81. Black Boy, by Richard Wright
82. Deal With It!, by Esther Drill
83. Detour for Emmy, by Marilyn Reynolds
84. So Far From the Bamboo Grove, by Yoko Watkins
85. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher
86. Cut, by Patricia McCormick
87. Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume
88. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
89. Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissenger
90. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle
91. Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Craighead George
92. The Boy Who Lost His Face, by Louis Sachar
93. Bumps in the Night, by Harry Allard
94. Goosebumps (series), by R.L. Stine
95. Shade’s Children, by Garth Nix
96. Grendel, by John Gardner
97. The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende
98. I Saw Esau, by Iona Opte
99. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume
100. America: A Novel, by E.R. Frank

That's a pathetic showing, I admit. time to get readin'.

I went ahead and undid hers that were in bold and then made bold the ones I've read. What really surprised me is the fact that some of them I read simply because my children were required to read them in school. I like to read what they are reading just so I can know if they are getting the material or answer any questions they may develop due to what they have read. There are only one or two that I can understand being on that list. Some of them totally baffle me why they would be on it like the Captain Underpants stuff and Julie of the Wolves. I know some of these are award winning books, because of the social issues they bring to light.
My thoughts on this is: a book that gets a child reading is good, and its up to the parent to monitor what they read. If you don't want your child reading a book then explain to them why it is objectionable to you. Its not up to the schools to make that call - to me its what parenting is all about.
I also feel the surest way for a child to want to read something is to find out it is banned. I know when I was younger I was always curious about the banned items and why they would be banned. I was good at finding ways to get copies of banned books to read with my friends so we could see what was so objectionable. (I went to a catholic school and there were a lot of banned books/movies that we weren't suppose to read like J R Tolkiens 'Lord of the Rings' one of my all time favorites.) If they just would put the copy on the shelf and make no big deal about it most kids will ignore the book if you have a well stock library. There are too many other books out there to get their attention.

Now I muse upon what book I should read next to find out why someone would want to ban it.

East Texas Oil Museum, Kilgore Texas

2011-09-26T10:39:00.001-05:00

On Saturday, I headed over to East Texas to look at some rocks in a backyard sale. My husband and I were done looking or I should say I couldn't carry any more rocks and had to stop looking, around 3:30. We decided to head back home. On the way to the sale we noticed signs for the East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore Texas. Years before we had taken our kids to that museum and liked it a lot. On the way back my husband suggested we visit it again. We got there at 4:00 an hour before closing. We missed the last viewing of the movie but was able to enjoy everything else.
Here's some of the photos I took of the place that isn't in its web page.

The front as you drive up to it.

The wooden oil rig that sits out front of the museum

More pictures of the wooden rig and how it was set up. This is suppose to be a replica of the one that discovered the East Texas oil field.

Some of the equipment that was used during that time

I liked seeing this drill bit. It was the deepest fishing job and went to a depth of 31,441 feet for the tune of $6 million dollars. I was amazed that they would go for recovering it and not abandoning that well. No telling how much it cost to drill that deep.

I liked seeing this sign that showed all the different products made from petroleum. Sometimes I have a tendency to forget all the things that are derived from oil.

A picture of Joiner and Lloyd the discoverers of the field.

They had a wall with different people who where honor for their work in the Oil industry.

I liked this display of belt buckles of the different companies that were involved in the area.

This was interesting showing the outline of the field.

They had a display case of other economic rocks from the area.

I thought this display was really clever. They had made quilted pictures using leather showing different oil traps. The black was the oil. I saw this display in the gift shop area and was hoping they were for sale, but they weren't. I wouldn't mind having some of these pictures in my home and said someone could make some money making replicas of these displays.

This was a replica of a present day working rig. I thought it was interesting to look at these and to see how some things are still the same while others have evolved over time.

They had a replica of a museum. I felt the display explaining this was weak and could use some work, especially if you didn't take the elevator ride or see the movie- after all it was suppose to be a replica of the museum and you think museums would talk about the geology of the area.. -- It was the geology in the area that made it so famous.
There was an Elevator ride that describe the geology that you go through to get to the pay zone. I thought it was a cute idea riding the elevator deep down into the earth. (You really didn't but they just rolled the display so it looked like you were). Basically the they talked/showed the different formations:
Queen City
Reckaw
Carizzo
Wilcox
- Wilcox is important because it has lignite in it.(swamps and near shore material)
Midway Chalk - composed mostly of forminifera (ocean deposits)At 1800 ft
Navarro Sandstone - @2200 ft
Marlbrook
Pecan Gap -@2800 ft
Brownstone @3100 ft
Austin Chalk @ 3400 ft which acts as the trapping mechanism.
Woodbine Sandstone @4200 ft - the pay zone
( they didn't talk about how old it was or what type of environment it was deposited in. Just that it was a sandstone with a lot of space for the oil.)
Under the Woodbine is the Wichita Limestone which is probably the source rock for the oil.
They did talk about the Woodbine being pinched out and that forming the trapping mechanism, but very little about the Sabine uplift causing the pinchout.
The show was only 8 minutes long, and I know they kept it short to keep kids attention but I did feel like they could have made it maybe10 minutes long and added a bit more geologic information. It did mention that the East Texas field was a water drive field with the water pushing the oil up to the Woodbine pinchout against the Austin chalk. The Austin chalk is a very tight formation and is mined in the south with it being a good source rock for making cement.

The museum did a very good job of capturing the feel of what it would have been like to live in Kilgore during those early years of 1930's. I think when we saw it before, the kids liked to see how their grandparents lived. They couldn't get over the fact there was no TV's or computers and just had radio and going out to the movies - things like that made very interesting to see. If you look at the website you can see the way the town was during that time.

After we were done at the museum we decided to drive around Kilgore. They have a lot of interesting oil and gas things to see in the area. I was draw by seeing all these derricks that were so close together. Usually in the industry the closest wells can be is on 5 acre spacing and these were a lot closer than 5 acres.

I couldn't imagine how they got so many rigs so close together.

Then we read the signs and found out that this was a replica of the richest acre in the world back when the East Texas Oil field was being developed in the early 1930's. It was because of wells being so close together like this that they started to regulate the spacing of wells to keep the integrity of the field going.

I thought it made a nice little park to go and see.

Around the corner from this park was another park that kids could play at. Called Christmas tree park. It wasn't named for Christmas trees but the equipment that is used in drilling wells and keeping them from blowing out.

Some other pictures of the Christmas tree park

And finally I just had to get a shot of the Texas Railroad Commission since I used to have to deal with them a lot back in my days of working in the oil industry. I always thought it was such an unusual name for being in charge of regulating the oil industry.

Muse thought: I wonder what it must have been like to own some acreage back in the early 1930's. And how heartbreaking it must have been if you were on the otherside of the Woodbine pinchout.

Rocking Backyard sale

2011-09-26T02:07:00.003-05:00

I went to the Gem and mineral show back in August ( here ), while I was there I met some interesting people. One person in particular I had a good time talking with. He was a vendor and my son bought a geode from him and had it cracked open. Because I got a couple of things from him he gave me a flier describing a backyard rock sale he was going to have in East Texas on Sept 24.
I took the flier to be polite and almost filed it away in my trash can but for some reason I decided to keep it. I never really thought I would go but I kept on thinking about all the nice stuff this guy had at the gem & mineral show.
Saturday the 24 rolled around and I was surprised we had nothing on the calendar. Usually there is some kid activity we have to go to like a football game or outing. My youngest son spent the night at a friends house and my husband and I found ourselves all alone. My birthday & my second son's birthday is in a couple of days and my husband wanted to know what else we had going on this week. We looked at the calendar and realized that next weekend we were going be very busy unloading pumpkins and working in the pumpkin patch. My husband said if we are going to celebrate it we better do it today, (my son is away at college so we are not planning on doing much with him for his birthday - we'll do it when he gets a break and can come home and visit). He asked me what I really would like to do to celebrate it. I thought about it and had a hard time coming up with anything, but then I remembered the flier I suggested going to backyard rock sale. I was surprised my husband said sure why not and we got in the car and drove an hour to this rock sale.
Needless to say I was in seventh heaven totally enjoying it, while my husband was bored. I was very thankful there was a mall close by and he was able to go there and kill some time at it. After awhile he came back to see if I was done yet but I wasn't. He had found a football game on the car radio station and said for me to take all the time I wanted because he was going to go sit in the car and listen to it. So I was able to spend all the time I wanted to at that place. The flier said there were 35 Tons!! of rocks and I believed. I was able to get some stuff that I probably would never have been able to get on my own, considering where I live.

I knew I was going to enjoy this place the moment I saw how his storage shed was design with these shelves of rocks on the outside.

Then you notice the storage bins all crammed full of rocks from all over the world. Like these:

And here's this one where you can see how many are in each bin.

And this was his back yard. I was amazed that they would have so many rocks.

I asked him were they all came from and he told me that his son was a geologist and got him interested in rocks and how he could sell them and make some money. He said he acquires industrial equipment and sell it to others. Frequently when he gets stuff there is rocks that come with the whole package deal. Through his son they've been able to pick out the stuff that will sell. They supply a lot of people with the stones that they use to do lapidary work.
Now on to the stuff that I acquired.

Left top - a crystallized bivalve. Top Right gastropod Exogyra Ponderosa, and bottom is a piece of a ammonite shell.

Oolitic sandstone

turrelite

With this one I learned something new. Turrelite is 'A Texas asphalt shale' (I need to pass this word to Evelyn when she gets to T's at Georneys). The picture above is the weathered surface, while the one below is the cracked open surface.

turrelite

Amethyst

I liked this Amethyst because it had such nice crystalline form, plus it showed how there was no cleavage in it but had a conchoidal fracture to it which is so typical of quartz.

Blue Azurite and green Malachite

Sphalerite

Sodalite

This one intrigued me. It is a gneiss but some of the minerals were hard to figure out. The guy I got it from was stumped by this one too. I've taken a couple of different images of it at different angles. I think the black minerals are in the garnet family based on the shape. But they were definitely altered.

Above the top of the rock had some shiny stuff that looks gold to copper in color. (Any insight on this rock would be greatly appreciated.)

Muscovite and Muscovite in a granite type rock.

The guy told me the rock below had tourmaline in it and was a granite. I thought he was totally wrong on that one - I thought the black mineral would be a hornblende and is probably in andesite or a tuff.

(Cath made a comment and so I decided to edit and add a few more pictures of this rock from different angles.

petrified wood

I was able to get all sorts of petrified wood. I could tell they obtained a lot of it and that was what most of the lapidary people were looking at. I liked the one above because you could see a branch on it. Also it had quartz veins running through it that may be opal.

Petrified wood

Looking at the petrified wood I could tell it came from different places. I asked the vendor but he didn't know where it came from. The bottom piece looked like it may have been from Arizona while the other two big pieces look like they may have been from south Louisiana.

Obsidian

I liked the rainbow obsidian because it did have the two colors it it and showed good conchodial fracturing. The other one I liked because it had feldspar phenocrysts in it.

Basalt

I liked this piece of basalt because I could see the columnar joints on it.

Anthracite

At first I thought this maybe another piece of obsidian or basalt. But when I picked it up it was lighter than the other rocks like that. It was in a separate bin with a lot of other rocks similar to it. The more I looked at the rocks in the bin I realized they were probably Anthracite. I need to do more tests on it before I'll know for sure if it anthracite or so something else.

There were lots of geodes and parts of geodes to look at. Here's some that I just called it chalcedony or agate. Below is another one that I liked the colors that were in it.

Agate

I liked the color in the one below. I thought it was an unusual yellow color.

chert/ agate

There were some good samples of quarts.

clear quartz with hexagonal, trigonal-trapezohedral crystalline stucture, next to some rose quartz

I thought this was an usual looking rock. The vendor and I tried to figure it out. I think at one time there was a shell there that has dissolved away and was later filled in with a siliceous solution. The pieces that chip away and revile a fresh surface that looks like chert.

This next rock I really like. When I saw the side I was WOW!! a minnie normal fault! With the right side the down side.

Then when I looked at the top of it, it was so neat to see the ripple marks on it. It was definitely a keeper and one I had to get.

Rhyolite

The vendor called this one Chinese paper ??? but I forgot the whole name. To me it was just a basalt with feldspar in it, most likely ~~orthoclase~~, plagioclase (thanks for the correction Cath).

Gypsum/selenite

Unakite

This one through me. I thought it was plagioclase in a olivine, but the vendor gave it a specific name so I wrote it down. When I got home I was able to find it on my one chart. I like learning new stuff like this.

Aventurine

At first I thought these were the same. But when it came time to get them I found out one was amazonite and the other aventurine. When I got home I couldn't remember which was which and had to look them up in my references. I think I got them right because the Aventurine is associated with quartz. While the amazonite is a green variety of microcline.

amazonite

jasper

scoria

and finally this one - a gneiss.

With that I wish you a gneiss day.

The Fall Equinox will be Sept. 23 at 9:04 am

2011-09-20T10:44:00.001-05:00

Last fall I read it was officially the Equinox on September 23 @ 3:09 am and commented it to my son. He wanted me to prove it. One of the ways to prove the equinox is to stand a raw egg up on its end. So I tried standing an egg up on the 23rd, not paying any attention to the time, and it did stand up. He wasn't impressed and thought you could stand an egg up any time.

Then in the spring we tested it again, but I got my days mixed up and was a day later but I was within the 24 hour window frame. Officially the equinox was on March 20 at 11:23 pm and I tested at 6:09 pm (cst) on March 21, 2011. Again the raw egg stood up (18 hrs after). I thought it was interesting that it would still stand up even though it was a day after. My son wanted to see how long the egg would stand up. So I kept on looking at it standing up and went to bed around 11:30 that night with it still up. In the morning of March 22 it wasn't standing up when we got up. We tried to get it to stand up but couldn't at around 7:30 am. (here ). We concluded that there just must be a 24-30 hour window that the raw egg would stand up for the equinox trick/test to work. During the next months that followed I made him try to stand an egg up again but he couldn't, since he wasn't convinced about the equinox causing the raw egg stand up.

This year I decided to see how long an egg would stand up. I wanted to see if it would stand up earlier than 24 hrs before the equinox. So I decided today I should start the testing since the equinox isn't until Sept 23 at 9:04 am. I wasn't expecting the raw egg to stand but it did today at 8:46 am. cst.

Here's' what Wikipedia has as the dates for the equinox

UTC date and time of solstices and equinoxes^[1]
year	Equinox Mar		Solstice June		Equinox Sept		Solstice Dec
year	day	time	day	time	day	time	day	time
2004	20	06:49	21	00:57	22	16:30	21	12:42
2005	20	12:33	21	06:46	22	22:23	21	18:35
2006	20	18:26	21	12:26	23	04:03	22	00:22
2007	21	00:07	21	18:06	23	09:51	22	06:08
2008	20	05:48	20	23:59	22	15:44	21	12:04
2009	20	11:44	21	05:45	22	21:18	21	17:47
2010	20	17:32	21	11:28	23	03:09	21	23:38
2011	20	23:21	21	17:16	23	09:04	22	05:30
2012	20	05:14	20	23:09	22	14:49	21	11:11
2013	20	11:02	21	05:04	22	20:44	21	17:11
2014	20	16:57	21	10:51	23	02:29	21	23:03
2015	20	22:45	21	16:38	23	08:20	22	04:48
2016	20	04:30	20	22:34	22	14:21	21	10:44

Now I'm musing on how long it will stay up. I hope my son doesn't knock it over when he drops his school books off on the counter when he gets home from school.

Ocean Star Offshore Rig Museum - Galveston Texas

2011-09-16T09:13:00.001-05:00

I've written about the Ocean Star Museum before. I was so excited about this trip to Galveston, TX because I planned on visiting it again. If I didn't do anything else this whole trip - this was the one thing I knew for sure I was going to do. Unfortunately the first couple of days we were in Galveston it was rainy and from my experience its no fun to be on the rigs when it is rainy so I waited for a day when I knew we would have good weather. It was well worth the wait.
The first time I saw it I really liked it a lot because it was so typical of the offshore rigs in the mid 1980 when I used to work offshore (1986). When I first started to work (1981) we didn't even have fax machines or satellite connection, and the computers we used would take up a whole floor of an office building. But in a few short years all of that changed. I loved working offshore because they would always have the latest and most advance technology available. I can recall them getting the first fax machines for my company and satellite connections and personal stations for the computer to work at.. It used to boggle my mind to be 120 miles offshore and being able to communicate with the home office. Now-a-days I'm sure the offshore rigs would look like nothing I used to work with 30 years ago. That's what makes this rig so special because it still has the look and technology of the 1980's rigs and reminded me so much of what I was used to working with.
This time it was even more special to me because I got to show it to my son, and he was able to ask a ton of questions about what I used to do and what things were used for. I was amazed at how much I recalled and how many of his questions I was able to satisfy. Sometimes I would give him too much info on an item and I could see his eyes glaze over, but other times I could see the light go off in his head and knew he was really understanding what I was telling him. I also liked the fact that when I couldn't recall what a certain thing was right away if I looked around I could usually find a description close by, or I was able to refer to the self guiding souvenir guide book I had got.

OCEAN STAR Offshore drilling rig and museum, Galveston TX

The view you get when you first pull up to it.

A view of the entrance to the Ocean Star

And this is right before you actually can get on to the rig. I must admit I really liked getting onto an offshore rig this way. Before for when I would get on a rig I was either ferried in by a work boat or by a helicopter.

Once inside you are in the area that would have been the cafeteria/ general hang out area of the rig. There was a person there to help you start on your tour. The first exhibit was this one where it explains that the Ocean Star was once a Jack-up rig and how it was positioned on the ocean floor.

This is the scaled model of the Ocean Star, which was built in 1969 at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Beaumont TX for the Odeco fleet. Diamond Offshore Drilling then acquired it, and finally it was decommission in 1984. In 1995 she was turned into a museum by the Offshore Energy Center.

In the museum area they talked about the history of offshore drilling. My son liked seeing this board showing that some of the earliest offshore drilling started in the parish in which we live in 1911. Its hard to believe that this type of drilling has only been around for 100 years.

I liked this display because this showed what was going on when I entered the industry back in 1981.

This one was good because it gave a geologic perspective to the areas that get drilled.

This one showed how they first find an area with seismic work.

Below is a scaled model of a seismic boat

This is a model showing directional drilling. Offshore wells use a lot of directional drilling. It was nice to see how they explained it, since its not the easiest thing to explain to a child.

This didn't turn out the best, but I liked it because it showed where the off shore wells have been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico in this area. .

My son liked this one because it showed the 'Devils Tower Spar Platform Model' this is the worlds deepest spar.

I thought this one very informative showing how a well is completed. My son asked about the Horizon oil spill and I was able to show him some about it using this display.

This was another good one showing how the well is completed.

He wanted to know what oil looked liked in the ground and so I pointed to these cores that had oil in them. you don't notice it here but with each core they showed different degrees of tightness - going from sandstone to shale.

I had told my son about the different drill bits and he was interested to find out that there are ones that are made with diamonds in them. I explained the diamonds were industrial grade stones, things that would never be used as jewelry but still he found it fascinating that they would use them. I like this exhibit because it showed the different drill bits and how they were made and what they would be used for.

Here's a close up of the drill bit I saw used the most.

He asked how the cores were gotten and I explained that there were special pipes that were used to get them. We then saw what a typical drill pipe looked like on the inside and how it connected together.

I then explained to him that getting core samples were very expensive and most of the wells would not have cores, but instead they would look at the cuttings that the drill bits would make. He then asked how would we know if we were in the right place to get the oil. I told him that they used special tools that were put into the ground and based on the information that was sent back you could figure out what zone you were in. It was so neat to be able to show him the logging tools that would send the information back.

He liked seeing this one. I didn't recall seeing this one when I was on the rig so I figured it must have been a tool used for setting casing, since that was normally the time I was done with the job and would be heading back to the office.

There were other things that caught his attention like this Power Tongs.

Or this WASP Atmospheric Diving System (ADS)

He really liked this Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROVs)

And playing on the 'Billy Pugh' Personnel Basket. I told him when you arrive by boat you have to use this to get onto the rig. He thought it would be fun to do but I told him it wasn't as much fun as he thought it would be, especially after you've done it a couple of times or if the water was really rough when you were leaving the ship. At first he tried to climb into it and I told him you put your bag in the middle and had to stand on the side and hold on like he is in this picture.

He liked seeing the typical sleeping quarters. He made the comment that his bedroom at home was bigger than that. And I responded, - you're lucky because you have your room to your self while on the rig you would have to share it with someone else or more likely 3 other people ( 2 shifts -12 hours shifts; people rotate using the beds). I told him that was very much the way it was like on the rig. There was very little privacy when you are on a rig.

Finally we were able to get to the rig floor out through some doors. He wanted to go right up to the drilling floor but I kept on stopping to look at the other stuff that was there along the path. Here's what you see when you first come outside.

In the center of the picture is drill pipe and also some drill collars on the pipe ramp.

Below the thing in red is a cementing unit.

The sign explaining what that was. As you can see it was stop number 16 on the self guided tour. The guide book and the sign have the exact same wording on things so it was easier to read the signs with the large print than the guide book at this point.

The next picture is of a Christmas Tree (green device). My son thought that it was funny to call this thing a Christmas Tree. He did joke around about not wanting a Tree like that for Christmas. I told him I wouldn't mind one like that if it meant we had an interest in an oil well that needed something like that.

The white piece of equipment is a subsea Christmas Tree. This type of equipment is what fail with the Horizon oil well blowout last year in the Gulf Coast that was such a disaster.

My son was curious why there would be this piece of equipment on a rig. It's a Hyperbaric Chamber. I told him that it was sometimes needed for scuba divers that would do work on the rigs deep in the water. It kept the divers from getting the bends. He asked me if I had ever been in one and I said 'thankfully no'. I've never had much luck with scuba diving - I have trouble stabilizing my ears and never could get a padi card.

The next yellow device is a Top Drive. It is the piece of equipment that rotates the drill pipe so that it can make a hole in the ground.

Normally you would never be allowed to go up into the drilling booth but since this was a museum you could go and see it. It takes a lot of training to become a driller and I can understand why when you see all these different lever and gauges you have to keep monitoring while the well is being drilled. I enjoyed looking at everything, since it was so rare for me to see this stuff. Too bad it wasn't in action, that would have been really fascinating to watch.

A closer look at the gauges and levers used in drilling a well.

This section had to do with controlling the mud pits and the fluids that were used in drilling the wells.

The bottom of this yellow thing is the Kelly, Then in the middle is the Swivel, and above that is the hook. Coming off of this is the black hose called the rotary (Kelly) hose. (I noticed that the next few items were not in the guide book, but I was appreciative of the fact I had been on a rig and knew what they were and could tell my son about them.)

The Red and yellow is the rotary table assembly.

Here's more drill bits that would normally sit on the floor so that they could be easily changed out. Most of the time you wouldn't have such a wide selection of bits.

Next I looked up the Derick. I thought this was so neat to see. The yellow piece is the Traveling block.

The Red devices is the Choke Manifold

My son was surprise to see the big crane on the rig. I told him that it was used all the time. Every movable thing that is on the rig is brought up by that crane. As he could see there were some pretty big pieces of equipment there that were all hauled up by that crane. The crane was so big we couldn't get it in one shot and had to take two to get it all.

My son thought I was taking a picture of the helicopter, which I was but was also trying to get that white circular thing to the left of the helicopter. It is a Jack-up Leg. The Jack-up legs are what the Ocean Star sits on.

Every offshore rig has these devices on them. They are the escape pod or capsules in case you have to abandon the rig. You have to be trained in order to know how to use them. I always liked the fact that they are totally enclosed and are bright orange and they have equipment on board so that you can be found at see. One pod can hold up to twenty eight people.

Here's a pod in its original position on the Ocean Star.

My son asked me where I spent most of my time when I was on a rig and I told him it was usually in one of two places. The Mudlogging Cabin or the Wire line Servicing Unit. I very rarely was anywhere else since the rigs can be so hazardous to be around. I felt safe and secure in these areas and that was were most of my work was done anyway.

And here's what typical Mud logging cabin looked like on the inside. Unfortunately we were not able to actually go inside of one and just had to look in through Plexiglas panels.

And here's what the Ocean Star says about the Wire Line Servicing Unit

Here's my son poking his head into it and commenting about how small the area was. I couldn't argue with him there.

Sorry these aren't better pictures but I had to use the flash and it reflected back off of the Plexiglas.

Another picture of inside a Wire Line Servicing Unit.

And finally I just had to include this picture so you could see what was across the bay. It was a yard that had the Jack up legs stored. They are a lot more impressive to see in person than from looking at them in this image.

And another view of Jack-up legs. Notice how big they are compared to the ship that is next to one.

Needless to say I had a great time at the Ocean Star and was so glad my son was able to go and see it with me. I must admit there is a whole lot more to see and do at that museum but I just covered stuff that caught my interest or wasn't covered by the guide book that I felt like needed to be added.

If you ever get a chance to go to Galveston you definitely should make the Ocean Star a place to visit.

Now I muse upon when I'll be able to get to visit it again.

PS I've written other posts about the Galveston trip and they are here @ my 1st post
Here's post for the Aquarium

Things around Galveston
The Rainforest
Dino Alive

Dino's Alive @ Moody Gardens, Galveston TX

2011-09-16T09:03:00.003-05:00

We went to Galveston this summer and the thing my son wanted to see the most was the Dino Alive exhibit. I couldn't blame him I wanted to see it too!!. Just imagine coming face to face with a dinosaur, well actually face to whatever part of a dinosaur!

Megalosaurus at the Moody Gardens 'Dino Alive' exhibit 6-22-2011

It was part of the Discovery area at the Moody Gardens in Galveston Texas. We were there the week of June 21-26, 2011. (Now that the kids are back to school I finally have a little bit of time to do some blogging about some of the things I did this summer.)

Discovery Pyramid at Moody Gardens, Galveston TX

First you had to go through this pyramid to get out side to the Dino exhibit in the back. At the Discovery Pyramid they had a permanent exhibit showing the skeletons of different animals and how the rest of the organisms are attached to the animal. It was very interesting to see how it went from just a skeleton to the way the animal would look like in life.

Can you guess what animal this was?

It's a head of a sperm whale.
This one is a little easier.

I went to a school where our mascot was a Bobcat, so I just had to get this one. Here's is a little something more about Bobcats.

I also liked this one of a Kangaroo.

I found this all very interesting but my son was constantly wanting me to hurry so we could go to their special exhibit that was only showing for just a short time. It was called 'Dino Alive'. (I wondered why he was in such a hurry to see it, and why he kept on pulling me so we could go to it.)

Here's the brochure that we got when we went into the exhibit.

Moody Gardens 'Dino Alive' exhibit, Galveston TX (6-22-2011)

The first thing my son had to see was the Triceratops. When he was little he used to have a toy that was a Triceratops. It was one of his favorite toys, but the horns were taken off of it because he once used it to poke his older brother with it. He still liked playing with it anyway and liked seeing this animated one with horns.
He thought it was so exciting to see what one would have looked like in real life. These 'Dino's' in the exhibit were automated and it caused him to back up when it turned its head toward him and roared at him. That was more than what he was expecting, but it made it feel more real like. I was just glad we didn't have the real life smells for those Dino, could you just imagine how awful they would have been.

Triceratops at Moody Gardens 'Dino Alive' Exhibit

Each Dino had a sign in front of it to tell you what you were seeing and a little bit of information about it as is seen in the sign above. Because the signs were so big they were hard to get pictures of, so I only got a couple of them so I would know what they were like but I knew that I'd be able to look the animals up on the internet once I got home and had more time to read up on them.
Here's some more about Triceratops from Wikipedia .

Baby Triceratops @ Dino Alive exhibit Moody Gardens

Now on to the others that were there:
Amargasaurus

Amargasaurus at the "Dino Alive' exhibit @ Moody Gardens

Suchomimus

Suchomimus @ Moody Garden's- Dino Alive exhibit

Allosaurus

Allosaurus @ the Dino Alive Exhibit, Moody Gardens

Megalosaurus

Megalosaurus @ Moody Garden 'Dino Alive' exhibit

Omeisaurus

Omeisaurus @ Moody Gardens 'Dino Alive' exhibit

And a Dino exhibit wouldn't be complete with out this fellow- Tyrannosaurus

Tyrannosaurus at Moody Gardens Dino Alive exhibit

And another shot of T-Rex eying that nice juicy herbivore Omeisaurus.


Tyrannosaurus @ Moody Gardens 'Dino Alive' exhibit

And here's a picture of a baby T-Rex, isn't it cute? Wouldn't you love to have one too?

Baby T-Rex at the Dino Alive exhibit, Moody Gardens

One of my all time favorites is this guy- Stegosaurus. When I was growing up there used be one sitting in front of the Natural History Museum in Cleveland and that was one of my all time favorite places to go. Every time I went I just had to visit the Stegosaurus there and when I took my kids they had to say hi to him too..

And now we're back visiting the one in Galveston TX. Here's a bit more on Stegosaurus. This guy didn't seem as big as the one in Cleveland but it was still an impressive size.

Stegosaurus at 'Dino Alive' exhibit, Moody Gardens Galveston Tx

Deltadromeus
How would you like meeting this guy on the delta?

Deltadromeus at the Moody Gardens, Dino Alive exhibit

Parasaurolophus
showing her protecting her hatching eggs.

Parasaurolophus at Moody Gardens, Dino Alive exhibit

Parasaurolophus nest, Dino Alive exhibit - Moody Gardens

Dilophosaurus

Dilophosaurus at the Dino Alive display, Moody Gardens

And last shot is of Massospondylus

Massospondylus at the Moody Gardens - Dino Alive

As you leave the exhibit I thought it was cute that they had this sign. Reminded me of the movie Jurassic Park.

Warning High Voltage sign

Now I'm musing about my next post which is where I really wanted to go on this trip..... The Ocean Star.

PS other posts I've done on the Galveston trip are here.
Here's post for the Aquarium

Things around Galveston
The Rainforest
Ocean Star

Beautiful flowers & other things around the Moody Gardens, Galveston Tx

2011-09-16T08:51:00.002-05:00

Continuing my thoughts about my vacation to Galveston Texas -Moody Gardens.
We couldn't help but notice all the beautiful flowers that they had planted around the facility at Moody Gardens. It was enjoyable just walking around the area. Here's some of the delightful stuff we saw in and around Galveston while we were there.

There were flowers there that got my attention, like these:

I couldn't figure out what these were but I suspect they are in the periwinkle family.
One of my favorite flowers that I see all the time in the south is the Black-eyed Susan or its more proper name according to Wikipedia of Rudbeckia_hirta.With a name like that I'm not surprised people call them Black-eyed Susan.

Rudbeckia_hirta or Black-eyed Susan @ Moody Gardens

Here's another plant that I liked but didn't get its name.

Another lovely Hibiscus with some dew on it.

yellow Hibiscus

Another lovely plant - Oleander

pink Oleander

While we were enjoying the Gardens, we noticed this noisy Gull. I think he like being high up on that light post so he could look for people dropping scraps of food.

Here's some of the things he was looking at.

As we were watching him a flock of Pelicans flew overhead. Brown_Pelicans are the state bird for Louisiana and there numbers were greatly reduced after the Horizon oil spill of a year ago. I don't get to see them very often, so when I do, I like to watch them. I was very grateful to see that the Brown Pelicans were doing so well in this area.

Here's one that landed and just looked like he was posing to have its picture taken.

Pelican in Galveston Bay

Pelicans flying above.

We continued our walk and my son was drawn to this paddle boat. He wanted to know if we could go on it. So we walked over to see it and find out if we could ride on it. It turns out it is a restaurant where you take a cruise of Galveston bay while you eat. We had other plans for dinner, meeting with friends and business associates, while we were there so we never did get to go on it. This will be an excuse for coming back to the area.

'Colonel' Paddlewheel Boat, Galveston TX

And here's what the Moody Gardens look like walking back along the shore line.

As an afterthought, I've decided to include the map that they give you to help you navigate your way around the place. As you can see there is a lot to see and do while you visit the place.

But we came to Galveston to see the ports and the ocean.
Isn't Galveston pretty at night with all the lights?

Sun setting on Moody Gardens.

Ocean View of the Gulf Coast at one of the public beaches near mile marker 33.

A lot of sea weed washed up onto the shore.

Dunes with vegetation holding them in place.

The flatness of the beach, and it being so hard people drive on it.

The beach from a different direction. What amazed me was how there were so few people on the beach. In town there were so many people, but if you drive out towards the one end there are few and few people there. I liked having the feeling we had the beach to ourselves.

I think one of the things that kept them away was all the sea weed that had washed ashore. I did like looking at it and seeing things that were in it like shells and such. I must admit that in spots it would have that dead fish smell and wasn't always the most pleasant thing to be around.

And it was fun walking in the surf with our shoes off.

Here's another Brown Pelican at a different location on Galveston's island.

Brown Pelican in the Galveston Bay area

After being disappointed we couldn't go on the 'Colonel' paddlewheel boat, my son was excited when we were touring the area later in the week and came upon this sailing ship.

The 1877 Iron Barque 'ELISSA', Galveston TX

Aboard the 'ELISSA' sailing ship, Galveston TX

There is something about sailing ships that just captures my attention. I guess it just captures my imagination of a time long ago.
There are not many sailing ships left. This one almost didn't make it. It had been converted over to a steam engine ship and then was abandoned in a ship junk yard. But some people recognized it for what it was and were able to restore it to its former self. I'm glad they did. I'm also glad they made a museum out of it and have it so its open to the public to view.

After we got done in garden it was on to see Dino-Alive!!

PS Here's the 1st post on my Galveston trip.
Here's post for the Aquarium

The Rainforest
Dino Alive
Ocean Star

The Rainforest at Moody Gardens, Galveston TX

2011-09-16T08:23:00.002-05:00

I went on a trip to Galveston, TX in late June and wrote a little about it here. The first couple of days we were there it rained, which at the time everyone really wanted since it had not rained since Jan 24 in that area. We didn't mind because there were lots of things to see and do in the area. One of the things to do is the Rainforest museum.
Here's what it looks like on the outside of it.

The Rainforest Pyramid at Moody Gardens, Galveston TX

And here's what it looks like from the inside looking up. I liked the geometric design of the place.

To get to the Museum we had to walk outside and they had an exhibit with two live Otters playing. Otters are almost extinct and the place was fortunate to be able to get these two. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Otters

Once inside the pyramid there was all sorts of display cases with exotic animals that are found in the Rainforest. My son liked see these the best.
Below is a poisonous Dart frog. You wouldn't think something so small could be so deadly to humans. This is the animal that the Amazon's used to coat there darts with that they use to hunt with.

I like the way they had nice signs explaining what you see see.
I know the pictures are not the best. Like the Aquarium you could not use a flash in the building so it all depended on the lighting of the exhibit whether the pictures turned out or not. I did take a lot that ended up getting deleted since they were too difficult to see.

Iguana

Here's a snake that at the time I could tell you what it was but right now its totally slipped my mind. All I know was it is poisonous.

This exhibit I found really fascinating to look at. They had butterfly's hatching from their cocoons. They had them so you could see all different stages of how the caterpillar metamorphosis into a butterfly. They also had signs explaining things too. I think this was a Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly

I think the one below is a Monarch Butterfly. These were in two different locations.

What was neat to do was to go into this area that had a fine net around it. There were all sorts of butterflies flying around. The Monarchs were in this enclosed area while the Tiger Swallowtails were in the display area.

After we saw the butterflies we started to walk around. I was surprise to see this bird just standing in the middle of the path. I started to look at him and expected him to fly away, but he just stood there. The more I looked at the bird I could tell it was a juvenile that was starting to molt. The bird obviously had been hatched in the Rainforest pyramid and had been around people its whole life and thus its lack of fear of people coming up and taking its picture.

A molting Sunbittern

This Sunbittern was starting to molt some of its baby feathers. It was so engrossed in it that it paid no attention to people just walking up to it. It was fascinating to watch and it did put on a show.

A Sunbittern starting to open its feathers.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Sunbitterns.

Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias major)

The main thing about the Rainforest wasn't about the unique animals you find there (but that is what my son was most interested in) but more about the abundant and varied vegetation that grows so prolifically there. What was very interesting to me was the fact that just a few years earlier when I had been there the pyramid had been closed because of all of the damage it had undergone with Hurricane Ike in 2008 (Ike had been very damaging as read in this Wikipedia article about the 2008_Atlantic_hurricane_season ).
They basically had to redo most of the pyramid, yet just 3 years later it was looking like this.

Zebraplant at the Rainforest Pyramid, Moody Gardens Galveston TX

Again I like the way the plants had signs by them so that I could know what I was looking at. Now if I could just remember it all when I see them in other places. I wish I could take plants and signs like this around with me, but instead I've settled for a photo or two.

Sealing Wax Palm @ the Rainforest Pyramid, Moody Gardens Galeston, TX

Now I'm just going to include a few of the many pictures I took of plants that I enjoyed viewing.

Rosey Periwinkle @ Rainforest Pyramid, Moody Gardens.

Wild Orchid

Java Laurel

Anthuriums

They were all around this lovely pond.

Which was feed by this waterfall.

African Violets

Here's the brochure that came with the Rainforest Pyramid. You were suppose to keep track of the birds you saw. We saw most of them but not all of them.

Someone did not realize there were Parrots there too, and they were not in the brochure.

Now I muse upon what these two parrots where saying to each other.

PS Other posts about the Galveston trip are here,
Here's post for the Aquarium

Things around Galveston
Dino Alive
Ocean Star

Galveston trip - the Aquarium at Moody Gardens

2011-09-16T08:16:00.003-05:00

   One of the first things I ever learned in geology was James Hutton's ' The Uniformitarian Principle' Which is 'The present is the key to the past'. Ever since then I've always kept that in mind and try to observe as many present day processes as possible to gain insight as to what maybe happening to a formation that I may be observing at a later time.
   When I was studying geology, one of the fields that fascinated me was paleontology. I couldn't get enough of it ever since I found my first fossil (which will be in a later blog). Since most of the stuff a student of paleontology looks at comes from oceans because that is were the fossils are best preserved, it just stood to reason I should go to the oceans and observe things. Unfortunately that is not always possible so the next best thing is going to aquariums. Needless to say I love going to aquariums and observing things in them.
    Galveston is a great place to visit because not only do you get to see things in the ocean they also have a great aquarium at Moody Gardens. I was able to go in late June for about a week. When we got there we noticed three large pyramids, one teal color, one clear and one reddish. Checking in we were given a map of the area and realized that the three pyramids were the aquarium, the Rainforest exhibit and the discovery place where they were having a special exhibit called Dino-Alive.

Now hears what Moody Gardens looks like looking from our hotel window.

Moody Gardens, Galveston TX

Here's the map that they gave us when we checked in. I couldn't wait to see some of the stuff. I've stayed at this place before but it was right after Hurricane Ike came through in 2008 and most of the stuff wasn't opened because of the damage it had sustained from the hurricane. It was nice to now have everything opened again.

Map of the Moody Gardens, Galveston Tx

The first day we got there it was raining so visiting the beach was postponed to another day. I was just glad there was other things to do in the area. Since the aquarium was the closest to the hotel it was the first to visit for us.

This was the view from our hotel window of just the Aquarium.

And here is how it looked as we were approaching it. I thought this was a neat picture.
I could hardly wait to see what was inside.

One of the first things that caught my attention was this Nautilus.

Modern day Nautilus at the Moody Gardens Aquarium, Galveston TX (6-22-2011)

Nautiloids have always had a special place in my heart for two reasons. When I first got into grad school my adviser was a paleontologist who specialized in cephalopods, especially ammonites. Needless to say I learned a lot about ammonites and nautiloids through him.
The second reason is more personal, but is worth telling the story anyway. My husband and I met through a mutual friend that happened to be my insurance agent also. At first we were just friends that hanged out together, since I had a different boyfriend at the time. One day I had to go by my insurance agent place of business to get my insurance card for my car. I timed it so that it was right at closing time and my friend and I could go get a drink after she was done working along with a couple of others from her work. We stopped by his cubicle to see if he wanted to join the group also since they worked together. At that point I had known him for about a month or so and thought he was a very nice guy but hadn't really done much with him. He wanted to join us but had to finish up a couple of things before he could go. So we stood waiting for him, and I started to look around. On his office bookshelf he had a Nautilus shell. That really caught my eye and I asked him how he got it since they are rare. He said he wasn't sure how he got it, it probably came from his brother who was a gemologist. Those words really perked my ears and it gave us something to talk about as we where out drinking. I couldn't get over how he seemed so interested in what I told him. (Here's the Nautilus shell that caught my attention).

Nautilus shell

To make a long story short, about a year later we were married. He remembered how I liked nautiloids so much and one of the first gifts he ever gave me was this ammonoid. He thought it was a nautiloid at the time. I told him he was close since they were both in the Cephalopod family. (Not knowing where this came from, my best guess as to what it is: definitely an ammonoid; probably- Dipoloceras (Oxytropidoceras)?and probably from the Cretaceous time. I based this on its elaborate suture pattern, loosing of the coil, and the shape of the shell.)

     How could I not love a guy who gives me presents like this? He definitely knew the key to my heart.
   So ever since then I've really love Nautiloids. They are not that common and you don't see to many of them in aquariums so when I saw the one above I was fascinated with watching it. They always amaze me the way they moved around. Unfortunately this guy wasn't very mobile the day we were watching him and my son couldn't understand why I was so fascinated with this creature and why I wasn't bored watching him. He wanted to move on to other more exciting stuff like....
The Penguins. I tried to take some pictures but they just were too fast, and we were not allowed to use the flash in the place.   Needless to say most of the pictures I took just did not turn out really well. (I'm going to included them anyway since the reason I have this blog is for me to journal my stuff anyway).

The place was big and there were a lot of display cases so after awhile we moved on to other things. I was amazed at what I could get photos of without the flash and what I couldn't. I was all in the way they had the lighting set up for the exhibit. Like I said some of these are not the best but everything was fun to observe.

I even liked getting this picture of the a seals skeleton, (at least with the seal I could use the flash and get a good image).

Seal skeleton @ Moody Gardens Aquarium

As we walked though the place we came upon this big tank. Needless to say when you first enter it you just automatically say WOW! There is such a sense of awe and wonder as your mind processes what it is seeing and you start to walk into it. Needless to say its an awe inspiring place to witness.

The Aquarium at Moody Gardens, Galveston TX

Seeing the sharks swim over your head and around you is truly awesome.

Shark swimming over head at the Moody Gardens Aquarium

I just wished they would have been still long enough to get a really good photo of one, or have the lighting so that you can get a good shot without using a flash. These are the best I could get. And this is after watch them for a long time hoping they would come close enough to the glass barrier where you could get the shot and I took a lot of them only to delete them because they didn't turn out. I guess they know better because the day we were there they mostly swam in the center of the tank and the pictures just wouldn't take because they blended in so well with the murky water.

This was my sons favorite one. He really liked seeing the sharks teeth.

They were still fun to watch anyway and I was glad we could observe them the way we did. This area we spent a lot of time, because there was so much to see in the aquarium and it just wasn't the sharks we were looking at.

Then we went on to other areas. My son like this one the most because you could put your hand in the water and touch the things in the tank. He liked touching the star fish because they would move when you touched them.

One of the things I always like looking at is the Sea horses. I was amazed that I could get such a good picture of one since they were moving around so much in the tank.

I especially liked this little ones that were hiding in the sea grass.I thought it interesting how they would hold onto the grass with their tails.

This tank I liked because it was so colorful. My son wanted a picture of it since I was suppose to be a clown fish. Ever since he saw Saving Nemo - he's loved clown fish.

And finally the last picture is of coral. I wanted that because when I studied geology, it seemed coral was one of the few things I could readily find and identify in rocks. Coral tells a lot about the depositional environment when you find it. (Matt over at GeoSphere does a lot better job explaining the significance of crazy coral )
I always loved how the coral could come in so many different shapes and colors.

Now that I'm done with this one its on to the Rainforest.

PS - I should have written this back in June when I first got the pictures and such but I wanted to do things in sequential order and I ran into problems with downloading things from the trip to Galveston.
1st post on Galveston is here.

Things around Galveston
The Rainforest
Dino Alive
Ocean Star

What I remeber most about 9-11-2001

2011-09-11T21:59:00.002-05:00

I have a son that is 12. Today he's been asking me what I remember about 9-11-2001. I'm surprised he remembers that day because he was only 2 1/2 years old at the time. He remembers being in day care. He remembers the teachers telling them they had to take a nap early and they had to be very quiet and still. He recalls his teacher crying and wondering what happened for her to be crying. Then he remembers all the parents coming and getting the children early. I'm amazed that he remembers this much - I really didn't think he would remember anything about that time.

Now my son is trying to figure out what happened and what each one of us remembers most about that day and the time just after that event. For me there are four distinct things about that day/time I'll never forget and I shared them with him. While I'm still musing about these things, I've decided to write them done.

The 1st thing I remember was needing to go to the grocery store, but not going because I was fixated by the TV. Normally I don't look at the TV in the morning but I had been on the phone with a friend discussing PTA stuff when she said 'Oh my God - a plane just hit the world trade center- you got to turn on the TV and see this.' With that she said she had to go and hung up the phone. I went and turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit and then the world trade centers building collapsing. Then there was rumors of the Pentegon being hit too. I didn't want to move from the TV for fear of what else may be going on in the nation, then my husband got through to me on the phone and told me to go to the store now and then get the kids!. That was all I needed to jolt me into action because up until then I was in a daze not believing what I was seeing on the news. I was surprise he could get through on the phone since all the lines were busy when I tried to use them. So I went to the store like I had planned to do so for that day. While getting out of the car in the store parking lot, I looked up at the sky and I saw at least 10 fighter jets in the air circling over head. I had never seen so many air craft like that before. The hole sky was crisscross with contrails. I knew this was something more serious than I had realize to at that point. Shreveport is right across the river from Bossier City and the home of the 8th Air Force command and Barksdale Air Force Base. I was in the store trying to get the things on my list and as much can goods as I could because I was thinking there is no telling how this thing was going to affect interstate commerce and such and it was better to have too much in the house than not enough. While I was in the store there was music being piped into the store through a local radio station. Then the radio announcer broke in with some breaking news. The President of the USA was now at Barksdale Air Force base. I instantaneously got so angry with the news media at that point. I thought that was not information that should be being broadcast throughout the world - where the President at that moment was since he was obviously a target for them. I had visions of whoever was attacking us now being focused on the area where I was living wanting to bomb the hell out of it. I did not want to be blown to bits, just because the President thought our out of the way, middle of no-where was the safest place for him to be at that time. I finished my shopping as quickly as I could and went and got my kids who just so happened to be in three different schools and locations. I got home and saw the speech President Bush gave to the nation. I recognized instantly the room where he was giving the national address. Yes, he was definitely in our area. I had been in that room not too long before at a cub scout meeting where one of the fathers, whom happened to be in the air force, showed us emergency first aid and what to do in case of an emergency. At least I knew at that location they had all the state of the art equipment there. No wonder the President went there. All I could think about was the Cub Scout Motto of "Be prepared" and they were definitely prepare for something like this. I was so relieved when we heard back from my husband that the President was gone. Air Force One flew by his office window. (That is his strongest memory of the day seeing that plane fly by with all of its military escort, and him being so relieved to have him gone too. It reminded him of when the space shuttle Columbia flew by his window - here, only this time it wasn't a planned event and no pictures were taken.)

The next thing I remember was finding out a friend of my son was working on a project at the Pentagon that day. For a couple of days we didn't know how he was and everyone was frantic with worry about him. I just remember praying a lot for him since I had seen him grow up in the church I went too and felt he was like a family member. It took awhile for the whole story to come out. But he was in a room that the plane debris hit. A couple of the people he was in the room with were killed, that were near the window, while he got out with a couple of scrapes and bruises. We were so grateful he made it out alive but just felt awful about the people that died and what their families must be going through. It really hit home when you could place a name and face to some of the victims. Also when I realized he could of also easily been one of those people and how fortunate he was.

The 3rd thing was we had some friends that were traveling by air that day. The mother had taken her kids to school and then left and was on a flight to some distant city to give a professional talk that day and was suppose to be gone overnight and then come back the next day. The father had been out of town on business too and on his way home. He was suppose to be home by the time their 2 daughters were to get out of school. He too was in the air flying when this happened. Both flights got instantly grounded. They both ended up in these strange cities that they had no intention of being in. They both had to scramble to get a rental cars so they could drive home to their children. I remember getting a call asking for help by the mom in getting one of the girls from school if they couldn't get this other parent who was suppose to carpool the one child to a after school activity. All I could think of was what a nightmare that must have been for those parents having something like this happen and not be able to get home to be with their children when they really needed them at the time. The other carpool parent got the child and her sister and kept them safe until the father was able to get home by the end of the day, but the stress of that day was something we talked about for a long time afterward. It did make us realize how important it was to always have back up emergency people around to help us out in times of crisis like this was.

The fourth and last thing was my brothers life was in turmoil over all the things he had to be changed. I'll never forget that the attacks happened on a Tuesday, because my brother was supposed to get married that Saturday (9-15) after 9-11. With all the planes grounded, and nothing getting done that week, all their plans went up in smoke and the wedding had to be postponed. They didn't want to wait any longer. They ended up deciding to go ahead and take the cruise that they had planned & paid for their honeymoon (also because they had the vacation time all scheduled too and they would have had to wait until the next year to get time off for it. The cruise was also non-refundable -even with these extraordinary events. It was scheduled for a couple of days later and they had enough time to drive to the cruise ship as was part of their original plan.). They got married by the captain of the ship in a small private ceremony. I'm happy that they got married but was upset that we couldn't be there to witness the happy event. At least they were able to have some pictures made to share with us. Things like that just can't be gotten back. Now they look back and joke about it and how it made it such a memorable wedding for them, but at the time there wasn't a lot of laughing going on with everything being turned upside down.

Days like 9-11-2001 are days you never forget. It reminded me so much of when President Kennedy got shot. I was only 8 at the time but I still can remember it to this day, and that is a whole different thing to muse upon.

Accretionary Wedge -37: Sexy Geology

2011-08-26T23:09:00.003-05:00

Lockwood put out this call for Accretionary Wedge 37 on July 27. Its hard to believe the deadline has arrived. Normally I like to do these things early, but I've been having major computer troubles ever since Yahoo and Mozilla firefox has had updates which ended up crashing my computer. The computer has been in the shop and I just got it back today. Just in time so I could get something out for the wedge.

Call for Posts, AW #37: Sexy Geology

July 27, 2011 by lockwooddewitt

This month’s Accretionary Wedge asks the titillating question, “What is ‘Sexy?’” Hint: we’re not talking Victoria’s Secret.

I mean geology that makes your heart race, your pupils dilate. Rocks and exposures that make you feel woozy and warm. Structures and concepts that make your skin alternately sweaty and covered with goosebumps. Places you’ve visited, read about, or seen photos of that make you feel weak-kneed, and induce a pit in your stomach.

Click over to read the full description of what this month’s topic is (and is not) meant to entail. If you have a post to submit, please leave a comment and link either here or at the original call for submissions, so I can find it when I go to assemble this edition.

   When I saw this there were a lot of different places that came to my mind.   But then I narrowed it down to one. But after reading this Roadtrippin' post by Dana and seeing the pinnacles at Crater Lake with this Volcanic ramblings part 1 teaser @ Outside the Interzone post at Lockwood's I'm torn between which one to choose. Now he's added even more pictures of those pinnacles at this post what-is-sexy-geology that make me even more titillated . With both of these locations I have never been to, but just the thought of them sets my heart racing. Decisions, Decisions. I'm in such a corundum. Which one to choose.
   So my two choices are both in U. S. National Parks.   I've read about them and have heard people talk about them a lot. Everything I hear about them just makes me want to go all the more so and gets me so excited just thinking about them. The two are BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, TEXAS. and CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, OREGON. The one thing I've noticed about both of these locations is that they have unique volcanic structures associated with them.

   I studied Crater lake in school only when we studied it, the instructor was teaching us about 'caldera's' and said it should be called 'Caldera lake not Crater'. That caught my interest and ever since then I've wanted to see it. To me it was pretty neat thinking the lake formed in the center of a volcano. While Big Bend I never heard about until I got out into the workforce with a petroleum company. But its Big Bend that's won the coin toss, which is good because I know Lockwood and Dana Hunter are going to do such a good job with Crater Lake.

If first heard about Big Ben when I went to work for Marathon Oil. On the 1st or 2nd day on the job I asked my boss a simple question. "How did Marathon get its name?' I was expecting an answer along the lines of something to do with Marathon running or something about Greece at Marathon or events relating to the battle and the legend of Pheidippides. The answer surprised me. He said they were named after the Marathon mountains in Texas. He then clarified his answer by saying that was the area where the Old Ohio Oil company found a lot of its reserves that lead to the company being able to be the size company it was at the time. He then told me if I wanted to find out more about the company I should read the book "Portrait in Oil" by Hartzell Spense (1962). Its all about how Ohio Oil became Marathon. (It took a while to find a copy of the book but I finally got one and read it).
   After I had talked with him I was curious about the Marathon Mountains. I went to my Rand McNally Road Atlas of Texas and looked for them. Well Texas is a big state and I couldn't find the Marathon Mountains on them. So I went back to my boss and asked him exactly were they were. He said they were part of the Permian Basin in west Texas, just north of the Big Bend National Park, where the Rio Grande river dips down into Mexico. My boss was the main geologist for that office and he just loved geology. He then said something that got me intrigued about the area - he said 'Now that's a park for a geologist if there ever was one. It's got a little bit of everything there. You should go there sometime. If you ever end up in the Midland office you most definitely will get a chance to see the park then.'
   I went back to my office to find the Marathon mountains- I couldn't find mountains but I did find the Marathon basin and the town of Marathon just like he said it was--just north of Big Bend National Park. Since it was such an important area to my company I felt like I needed to learn as much as I could about the area as possible.
I thought I would make an weekend trip so I could see Big Bend for myself. I looked my map of Texas and realized it was about 750 miles away. I knew from driving to other areas that it would be a two day trip just to get there and another two day trip to come home. Also I knew I would want to spend as much time as possible there once I got there. I would need a whole week of vacation just for that trip (and I wouldn't have that for at least one year) Driving was out. So I looked into flying there. That was out too because it is in west Texas and there just is not much there. The closest place to fly into is El Paso but you still have hours of driving to get there. The price of the flight was outrageous too, neither location is popular destination spots and it just about made me pass out when I saw how much it was. So flying was out also, and all I was left was to dream about it and add it to my bucket list of things to do before I die.
   So whenever I heard of anyone going to the area I would ask them to tell me all about it. Every time I heard anyone talk about it, it just would make me green with envy with wanting to go there. One geologist friend said to me 'imagine a volcano, that is dormant. Now imagine a river cutting it in half and you can traverse through that volcano. It was the most incredible thing he's ever done.' He must have been talking about the Chisos Mountains in the center of the park.
Another friend that went there is an artist and she said it was an incredibly beautiful place to visit. It gave her a lot of inspiration just staying there. She really felt like she was in a desert when she went there. She liked the way it was so remote and she could get back to nature.   I found this very interesting because I love places that get me back to nature.

   While I was with Marathon I would very occasionally come across some of the electric logs in that area that was north of the park and other areas associated with the Ouachita Orogeny. It was highly faulted with thrust fault from the Ouachita Orogeny. Imagine that during the Paleozoic Era there being an deep ocean where shales, limestones, chert and novaculite were deposited. The chert and novaculite have a very distinct characteristic look to their formations and make it very easy to map over large areas because they were so massive since they were in the deep ocean. It would blow my mind to see these same sequences layer one on top of each other over and over again. Each layer was there because it was thrust on top of the other when the northern continent collided with the southern continent to from one huge land mass.
In the book 'Geology of National Parks, 6th ed' by Ann G. Harris, Ester Tuttle & Sherwood D. Tuttle (1975/2004) Chapter 53 pgs 791-804 Big Bend National Park, they talk about being able to see some of this in the northern part of Big bend at the Persimmon Gap area. In fact not only do you see the thrust plates of the Ouachita Orogeny but the effects of three Orogenys. As they put it 'The Paleozoic rocks in the thrust slices are the result of the Ouachita orogeny. Later, during the Laramide orogeny these rocks and their Cretaceous cover unites were altered by overthrusting. More recently , the rock unit have undergone extensional faulting due to Basin & Range deformation. (Tauvers and Muehlberger 1988 Persimmon Gap in Big Bend National Park, Texas; Ouachita Facies and Creatceous Cover Deformation in a Laramide Overthrust. Geological Soc. of America South Central Sec, Centiennial Field Guide v.4 p 417-422. )
Just imaging that boggles my mind.- thrusts upon thrust then normal faulting also. How they ever figured that out must have taken an incredible amount of time and imagination. Now I want to go see if their interpretations are reasonable. (I bet it is just from the seeing the subsurface stuff that I have seen).
   Also what I keep on thinking about is here we have sedimentary rocks that must be changed into metamorphic rocks. Not once but twice- I'm sure there has to be some pretty unique geologic features associated with that.
Then it dawn upon me that the Big Bend park has all three rock types: sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous. What could be more exciting to a geologist than an area where you can observe all three types. Not only that the rocks come from three distinct Eras: the Palezoic - shelf to deep ocean; The Mesozoic with Cretaceous formations that are transitional, shallow marine deposition, to the top formation (Javelina Formation) that is non-marine deposition complete with dinosaur bones (pterosaurs) and silicified wood. And finally the Cenozoic with igneous intrusions, volcanic ash, hydrothermal mineralization and normal erosion, deposition feature. I could go on about other things it has like anticlines and canyons but I think you get an idea what the place is like.
   Talk about a complex area!!! I would have been happy to go there just to look for dinosaur fossils in the Javelina formation. It's a good thing its in a national park and you can't gather samples there otherwise I would have figured out a way to get there a long time ago.

   To me this place seems to have it all, and that is why I muse upon Big Bend being such a geologically sexy place to visit.

Oops I forgot to add the link for Big Bend National Park info it's here.

Gem & Mineral Show - Bossier City, LA

2011-08-21T23:25:00.001-05:00

Every year about this time (2nd or 3rd weekend in August) the Gem & Mineral show comes to my area. I look forward to it every year. Usually on the weekend it is here I try not to have anything else planned so I can be there as long as I want to be. This year was no different.

   I love looking at rocks and minerals. In this area there are not many rocks outcrops unless you want relatively recent sedimentary rocks.   So I go to the Gem and Mineral show to get my yearly rock fix. Needless to say I spend many an hour drooling over gorgeous pieces. I just wish I had more money so I could buy them all.

   Also I like making jewelry and you can't beat the prices or the variety of items you can find at this show. I mostly concentrate on beaded stuff when I get things because I'm in a Mardi Gras Krewe and its just normal for me to pass out beads to people when I'm doing Krewe volunteer work. I like making my own beads, so that they are unique and something that people would want to keep and not toss away.

    This year I decided to bring my camera. I was glad I did have it unfortunately I forgot to bring extra batteries and only got so many pictures before my camera ran out of juice. I was happy to get what I did get. But here are some that I took.

This shot gives you an idea how big the show is.
What I really like about the show is the fact there is a lot more going on than just looking at pretty rocks. They have people demonstrating things, like how to make tools from rocks or how to make jewelry. If you have the time they're willing to teach you. You just have to be patient and listen to what they tell you.

I really liked the way they would work with the children to show them how it was done.

and here's some that were a work in progress and the tools used to make the things..

Finally here's the finish product that you could see.

They also like to have fun. This entire table was made from rocks and minerals, except there was one edible item there (other than rock salt) that you had to guess what it was. I couldn't figure it out.

Here's a closer look at the center table.

And an even closer look at some of the items. I could tell the cheese was calcite. The beans were agates, the jello was glass, the carrots coral, the life savers crynoid stems, the ice in the cup was clear quartz crystals and the salt and pepper shakers were carved limestone .

They even had food for the pets.

And this looked like my favorite meal. Fish with escargot.

I went with my son again and he quickly got bored trying to figure out what was the real food. He saw this guy breaking rocks open and got intrigued by it. It wasn't long before he had to pull me over and see what was going on with this guy.

It turns out that you could buy a geode from him and he would crack it open for you if you wanted it opened. There were no guarantees that there would be crystals in them, just the fact you are buying a rock. My son read this and had to get one anyway. I told him he had to use his own money and he did. I could tell he really wanted one a lot since he was using his own money. Usually when he has to use his own money he quickly looses interest in an item and decides not to get it.

I told him to get one that was lighter than the others or one that sounded hollow on the inside. He listen well and here's the one he picked out.

And here's what it looked opened up.

clear quartz geode

One of the things I love so much about going to the show is the fact that you get to talk to people who love rocks as much as you do. It seems like every time I go I learn something new. Like seeing these. At first I had no clue what they were. Then the exhibitor told me and I was amazed to find out they were:


lightening strikes-fossilized

Apparently the heat is so intense from the lightening strike it melt the sand. There's nothing like learning something new everyday.

Oh there was so much to see and learn. Some of the stuff I was told I had to take with a grain of skepticism because I knew not all of it was true. There was one exhibitor I knew was way off on his things but he was so convinced he was right. I just let him talk and walked away from him knowing there was no use in arguing with him but also knowing what he was saying was dead wrong.

But then there was fun thing to look at. Like these slices of geodes. You can't see it in this picture but if you held them up to a light there were totally different colors and features you could see than just looking at it straight on. They were so much fun to play around with like that.

Then there were some pieces you just had to drool over and wonder where they came from. I know this big piece came from an area in Mexico. It seemed like a lot of the minerals came from Mexico or China.

While the fossils seem to come from the mid east. Like Morocco or Arabia.

My son got really excited when he saw these:

But then when we got closer we found out these were scaled down models.

The tag did not show up in this picture but is says its one fourth of the original size. He was hoping they were the real thing and was very disappointed that they were not. I told them even though they were models they were still fun to look at and it was neat to see. He didn't want to look at these for very long after realizing they were models.

But then I did find these that you could tell were the real deal. Here's a fossilized shrimp we both enjoyed looking at. He wanted me to get it until we noticed the price tag. We settled for a picture of it instead.

Or this lizard. Like the shrimp this one was out of my price range, but at least I could get its picture.

This one didn't turn out real well but you could tell that this was a fossilized lobster. I thought it was nice that they had both halves of it. I didn't like the fact that they were selling them separately - I thought they should be kept together. I hope who ever does acquire them keeps them as a set.

One of the grand drawing prize was some teeth that looked liked this. My son really was hoping we would win something like this. With the number of people that were there I told him don't count on it. But I must admit I was wishing the same thing he was.

But the main reason I come to the show is to pick up material and ideas for making jewelry. This one piece caught my attention. I liked the color combination. I was curious as to how it was made.

So I flipped it over and was amazed at how simple it was and realized I could make something like this myself. I just had to find the right pieces. All it was was pieces of rose and milky quarts with a polish agate (the type that's used to make belt buckles) on the front attaching the two strands with a simple pin clasp.

I also found these earings that I liked and could afford.

The ones to the left are magnacite (at least that's what the lady wrote down) and the ones to the right are cloisonne.

In conclusion this is just a few of the beads and things that I ended up going home with.
From the top down. Clear crystal beads to use as spacers, then some red glass spacer beads, red cloisonne hearts, white(looks like marble didn't get the name), blue howlite (never heard of that mineral before), aventurine, rose quartz, white howlite, picture jasper, and dyed howlite to look like lapis lazuli.

Recently I did get a new set of book shelves, so I just had to get some bookends to go in it to keep my books from falling down. I found these spectacular ones at the show. The two cone shaped ones, that are raised up and polished out on each end, are Cepholopods - Orthoceras, (about 340 myo) from the Devonian Atlas Mountains, Morocco - North Africa.

This piece I found to be so artistic I just had to get it. It will look good on the shelves too until I fill them up with books (which for me will probably only be a couple of months).

The red crystals are Spinel and it is in a calcite matrix. It is from North Vietnam, the Luc Yien Mine. Heres a closeup but I couldn't get my camera to focus on it very well.

Now you can see why I end up spending so much time there at the show and why I wished I had more money.
Muse thought: What I love about blogging is now I can keep posts of these rocks and know when I got an item and where it came from. If I should ever happen to loose the label that goes with these items all I'll have to do is to go through my archive of posts and wahla there the information is. It's so much easier than keeping up with scrapes of paper.
I'm now musing on how I'm going to make the beads that I'm going to give to people.