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Seiko Watch
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Lost
- Hits: 830
Batshit had asked, "You collect watches...you don't have an old one..." and I couldn't very well deny, I did, and so I gave him an old Seiko I had, 70's, big and clunky self winder with day and date. It needed some work on the bracelet, which Batshit did, and then when I saw him next he was miming all the hand gestures he was doing to keep it wound, and explaining to me how the Japanese after it was invented used to march around like soldiers with their arms waving 'cause they had to keep it wound...
He's nothing if not amusing.
And then he described to me a curious thing: That while trying to set the date the alarm on the watch had went off...
I dismissed it, alarm watches are pretty rare, I've always wanted one, a Jaeger LeCoultre Master Reveille, maybe, but they're not easy to come by. Not on my budget anyways...
And, while setting the day, the date, what should happen but...
The alarm goes off. It's a vintage Seiko Alarm watch, self-winding (not battery), and I'm thinking what a cool thing and now Batshit will be wandering around town waving his arms proudly wearing the watch I never knew I had, or trading it away for a half a pack of cigarettes and a stale loaf of bread...
So it goes, "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...".
Crystals, crystals, more crystals
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 773
And stumbling through the forest, close to old haunts and scouting for new ones I find a narrow seam of quartz, silver ore, too small to be of any interest to the miners, but of some interest to me. Mainly for the abundance of quartz crystals, pretty, I'm pretty sure I can sell these in a gift shop someplace....
Early finds:
little beds of calcite crystals embedded in the reefs...
Great promise showing, needs to be cleaned and separated, this piece, maybe fifty pounds, 18 inches long by 10 inches wide...filled with ore, quartz, calcite, and some other minerals I have to identify...
a cross-section of quartz plates....
quartz
Some of them aren't so pretty before they're cleaned up. The black stuff is degraded Galena, or silver ore...
a tiny cluster of calcite flowers or plates...
Dirty Calcite Rhombus on quartz.
A few notes, a few perfect Calcite Rhombuses, small, but like the Icelandic Spar or Sunstones, cool, but too small to be salable. And cleaning these things up with acid gets the quartz clean but dissolves the calcite and fluorite and other crystals - have to be careful how I clean them, and there's more work in the cleaning then there is in the finding. I have a theory, that the best rocks in the shops all come from third world countries not because they have the best rocks, it's because they can afford the abundant cheap labour and time required to make these specimens spectacular.
And that's been the week, I worked that vein out, got about 300 lbs of material to clean up, now to write up a few notes on the specimens and shop them around. And get back into the woods and start searching for the next big find....
A Circa 16th Century Unicorn Horn
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 887
Courtesy of Batshit, over at his place he saw me ogling it, knew I had to have it...how to mount it?
Fishing
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1466
And so finally I get my fishing license and head off after work with another waiter to show him how it's done.
Only, as luck would have it, I'm no authority, and this fly-fishing reel and rod that I bought, they're not working so well.
Which is probably not so much the Rod as it is the other Rod. Fouling the line a dozen times and unable to to get a cast even a dozen feet into the lake I resolve to go home and watch some youtube videos on the topic (which inform me better, but both Rods are still fucked, trying again I got the line out further, but nothing like advertised. Time for a new Rod.).
But there was a gorgeous double rainbow (dude in front is the other waiter...)
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