Tracking myself

     I took a much needed break the second week of September, funded in part by my friend, DL (thank you thank you thank you) and visited the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.  It was wonderful, as expected, but just as exciting to me was a side visit, on the way, to the Hogg Mine in LaGrange, GA.  It's a defunct gem mine where you pay a small fee and the owners allow you to dig in old spoil piles in the hopes of finding beryls, rose quartz, or aquamarine.  I moved a lot of dirt and rock as I am used to doing when I fossil in the Peace River and consequently found some nice beryl crystals.

That's me, holding my beryls like a proud, grimy mama.

     Here I am, hamming it up, as I uncover the "find of the month", a big beryl crystal.  It's hard to feel sorry for me, complaining about spreading mulch and working on a shed when I actually paid someone to crawl around in the dirt with a pickax on a hot Georgia day.  I was in my happy place.

     Just as with my fossils, a big part of my enjoyment comes from cleaning and categorizing my finds.  Yes, I am a nerd.  I've had several people ask me what I am going to do with my rocks.  I am going to look at them.  That's it.

     Now the rocks are stored and the Smokies are a distant memory and I'm back to wandering around my yard.  I started searching through the calabaza vines for any baby squash.  I figured I planted them too late to get one big enough to carve for Halloween.  Surprise!

     I know I spend a lot of time going on about my calabazas but they are so fun!  This sucker was completely hidden under the leaves.  I finally harvested seeds from one of my 2 dried cucuzzi so maybe next year I'll go on and on about them instead.

     Thanks again to DL for naming the 4 chicks I raised.

     Ruby, Opal, Pearl, and Maude have officially survived chickhood and even though this is a terrible photo, it is their first time trying out the "big girl" roost in the henhouse.  Awww!

     I often ponder how much ground I cover with all these projects and constant motion and I heard on NPR about the different apps available to track your movements.  New world order and conspiracy theories be damned!  I want one!  I downloaded "Moves" and I love it.  It's also like a diary outline since I have a crappy memory and I can't wait to use it during the fossil season.  I don't send my info off to an account in a cloud so hopefully I'm no more exposed than I am with FaceBook but I'm compiling my daily movements in anticipation of making sense of all this activity.