Casual Conversation

Last Friday I went tubing down a river with my wife as part of a work function for her office. It was fun, but my wife lost her phone in the river. As a result, she had to borrow my phone for some calls, one of which was to her dad. In the process she accidentally called one of my old friends who shares a surname with him.

I've only seen him a handful of times in the last decade, and the last time we saw each other was over a year ago at her 50th birthday party. As it turned out, he was free this weekend and so he came over and we hung out and chatted on my deck for several hours.

I moved away from my hometown in 2013 for about 5 years for work. When I came back, it was slow getting reconnected with friends and then Covid hit. I used to be pretty social but I really don't have other friends any more, so it felt really good to hang out.

I went rockhounding with my parents. I've been spending more time with my parents lately, specifically my dad, but all 3 of us are interested in rockhounding and hadn't gone anywhere together in several years, so we planned a nice weekend trifecta of digging at 3 different locations. One of them was a bust, but the other 2 ended up being fun and exciting days of finds, with one specifically yielding some of the most spectacular rocks I've found in several years. It was a great weekend of connection with my parents, even if my long-standing opinion that my mom is pretty annoying was upheld, I stuck through it and still had a good time.

In particular, these 2 tourmaline specimens really knocked my socks off when I rinsed the dirt off of them. I'd never found any significant pieces of tourmaline in my many years of hunting around locations where it could be found, so two in a row on the same day was quite something! Some people really like finding the crystals by themselves, but I absolutely adore finding crystals in their original matrix where they formed. The single-crystal piece, in particular, has such a perfect presentation, I am over the moon that I get to add it to my display cabinet! The darker "top" end of the crystal even has parts of the crystal termination exposed! (It's hard to see in the photo, but just like a quartz crystal has its ubiquitous hexagonal point, tourmaline has its own unique, albeit more blunt, termination.) The larger clustered crystal doesn't sit well for good presentation, so I am going to 3D print a little holder for it to angle the rock in a way that displays the cluster nicely.

They will be displacing a little handful of tiny shattered and sad looking tourmaline pieces from this location I'd collected over the years lol. ( here's the relative size of the larger clustered piece )

I inherited my mom's house and we've spend the last 8 months renovating. Finally moved in (although it's only half renovated) a couple of weeks ago and put our house on the market. We've had a lot of sad feelings about leaving the house where we raised our kids, leaving our neighbors, and moving into something smaller. Yesterday I took off work sick. It was my first time since moving to just be here - not working, not cleaning, not moving boxes, ...-just to be here alone, nap, and look out the window. I was happy to be here and able to let go of a little sadness about leaving the other house.

A friend I hadn't seen in 7 or 8 years was in the country and made a point to visit.