Trip Report, part two

[jinian]

Never trust the Continental Breakfast. Here, it consisted of English muffins, shrink-wrapped high-sugar muffins, coffee, and orange juice. And bad jelly. Grape and mixed fruit are just not a sufficient selection. Fortunately, we'd been planning to supplement breakfast with a supermarket stop, and we did so. Cherries were $1.49 a pound. Mmmmm.
Something which happened slightly before the cherries, though, was not so great. I had a bit of a spat with Mom. I had been noticing the rough teasing, of a sort that has always rubbed me the wrong way, that Mom's family uses to show affection, and had been pondering it somewhat. That didn't stop me being irritable and short on sleep, though. So when Mom asked, "So are you saving this to get it waxed, or have you just declared a moratorium on shaving your legs?", well, I didn't react so well. It doesn't help that I'd shaved them less than a week before; my leg hair just happens to grow like mad, and I really hate that. And it's not her business! Though, you know, in her tribe it is. *sigh* We talked some about it. I said one thing of which I am actually proud: "I don't know how it happened, but I just don't share a culture with you." No idea whether she also thinks that was a significant thing for me to have said, but it's important and useful to me.
I found out Mom's worried about me because she thinks I cut myself off from everyone. (Well, no, just people with whom I have bugger-all in common.) To her, it's really important to be close to her family. She said a little bit later -- and I don't know whether she noticed how it tied in -- that because of the way she moved a couple times a year in childhood it became very hard for her to make friends. To me, that tied right in with the bit about needing to be close to family because they'll always be there and other people go away. My experience of family, though, is that they live far away and I see them every couple of months, if that; that nobody in the family is interested in the things I care about; and that they talk to each other in a way that I don't enjoy at all. There's a reason I hid in the attic and read during family gatherings, you know? I want to talk to her about this stuff again.
I don't know if she'll understand the idea of "chosen family", but my hope is that it'll make sense to her at some point, so she can stop worrying.
She was upset and had been crying when we stopped for those groceries. She was wearing sunglasses, and I didn't figure anyone would notice. Mom was positive that people would ask about it, and she was right. :) I said that in my tribe we might notice but we wouldn't ask, and she laughed. I think we're getting somewhere. Just a little somewhere for a while, but somewhere.
We eventually arrived at Richardson's Rock Ranch, which was amazing. They have a pen with parent and baby emus, but I was quickly distracted from those by the vast piles of different types of rock. Piles and piles of different jaspers, obsidians, and demisemi-precious stones. Chunks of rose quartz too big to lift. Petrified tree trunk sections several feet long. Stunning agate slices. And that's the stuff that was just sitting outside. They had lots of large polished spheres of each of the types of stone, sliced and polished thundereggs, fossils, stone bookends, and all sorts of things. (They also had some dyed stone, but I was able to overlook it for the most part.)
We borrowed buckets and picks, everyone under 30 piled into the back of Mom's pickup, and we drove out to the geode area. There are about half a dozen geode beds out there, and we ended up at the "Blue Bed" (by Mom's design, I later found out -- my rockhound uncle has had the best luck there, and that's where they went last time too).
To find geodes, one digs in this soft, damp, proto-sandstone stuff just underneath a layer of harder rock. The theory is that the geodes, which started out as mud bubbles, could move upward through the sandy substrate, but had to stop when they reached the tougher rock. So they sit in the sand, and when the bubble fractures slightly, various minerals seep in and form crystals or agate layers or whatever inside the bubble. They're very easy to spot, because they have a round or slightly oblong shape, owing to having been bubbles, and seams around them where the bubbles have broken to let other substances in.
It was very fun and satisfying work, and we really could have used a shovel to clear away the sandy stuff. I dug with my bucket for a little while, but eventually just got lazy and pushed the discards aside. Shortly before leaving, I moved to a site away from the rest of the family, where I found a huge number of geodes. Of course, we had to go away before I managed to excavate very many of them, but that spot is where I got the only one out of all of our collection with rose quartz in it.
Riding back down the hills and through the cow pastures to the shop, a bit over five miles, I basked in the sun and looked at the plants and landscape. You'd think you were in the middle of nowhere. It's beautiful desert. There was a cloud on the way back that glowed rainbow colors, which I've never seen before. I wonder why that doesn't happen more often. It was wonderful.
At the shop, we all put some geodes in line to get cut open and went to have a picnic on the grass. I was mostly pleased with mine. Cousin #3's largest one was rejected as not being a geode at all, but merely a mud clod, but he got some nice ones. Cousin #5 (3, 4, and 5 are the ones that came on the trip) had a pair of them that had fused together, and when that was sliced open, one had a crescent moon shape and one was very nearly a star. I'll put up some pictures of mine at some point. The shop wasn't polishing them that day for some reason, so I'm looking for someone in Seattle who might be willing to polish these or provide facilities for me to try it. Also, I have another ten or so that still need cutting. Anyone want to play?

Comments

[eub.livejournal.com]

demisemi-precious stones

*hug*

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Here I thought a comment from you would be about the rainbow-cloud. :)

[eub.livejournal.com]

Maybe I figured you had by now seen gobs of rainbowy clouds and would look back on your remark with blushing at your past innocence so I passed delicately over it?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Have only seen another one or two. They're not that common, even here.