Sunstone Digging at the Spectrum Mine

There has been this little mini-adventure of mining for sunstones we’ve been wanting to do for a few years, ever since we saw it on The Travel Show. 

Sunstones are a ‘rock’ that is feldspar.  They look like broken pieces of coke bottle glass (those of us older than 30 would know what that is…), predominantly a yellowish-white stone.  Some of them have what is called shiller; a streak of color that is mostly pearlescent orange, some have silver shiller-which is hard to tell as the caretaker told us-and some even have a green hue.  The ones that have ‘color’ or carat,  have a red dot inside not to be mistaken for rust that has seeped in through cracks in the stone, although those are rather pretty.  Sunstones were created millions of years ago when a volcano erupted, sending lava streaming all over the valley floor.  This lava was covered by a lake, tons upon tons of poundage pressing the lava.   Eventually as the lake water evaporated and the lava resurfaced, it ‘decomposed’ (quoting the caretaker) and somewhere in that process the sunstones either were created or came about.   

So the idea is to visit an actual working mine where these are the choices that are offered: get on your hands and knees and dig and scrape into the side walls of a pit or you can stand amidst piles of gravel dumped earlier by the caretakers via dump truck.  Or you can opt to stand for one hour at a conveyor belt and pick the gems off “Lucy and Ethel” style for the going rate of $300.00.   Whatever you choose, $300.00 gets you the whole 2 days of shoveling and sifting and your cabin is FREE, or you can tent camp on the public lands outside the mine area and dig for free but not too much chance of getting good quality gemstones for that price.  Hence, free.

Now, you know how you read a brochure and it will describe the accomodations and amenities and scenery, etc.?  Our brochure stated there were cabins, showers and toilets, shade trees and an office that sheltered wonderful gems and jewelry creations.

Well, our cabin had one old futon in it and it could probably have fit two with no walking space.  The floor was new tiled linoleum and there was one double clothes hook on one wall and one six inch shelf with a tiny votive candle on the other wall.  In the corner was a metal chair with the seating all torn to shreds.  I covered that with the only pillow there was, a large dusty thing... When we drove up we were looking for the shade trees...there were about 7 of them, maybe 10 feet tall, all planted in a 10 foot square area and just barely budded out.  They were young and fenced.  Probably to keep the marauding jack rabbits and occasional antelope from feeding on those bright, juicy young greens.  I figure in about 5 years they will be a half-way decent shade tree transplanted somewhere else.  The showers and toilets were not up and running the first day because the winds kept blowing out the propane light, so our option was a pit toilet with a cracked and rickety green shell that could blow over in a strong wind, or get taken away by a dust devil.   If  you have never used such facilities, it could have been a bit of a shock.  Then again, out there in the desert with no electricity or real running water, it's really pretty harsh out there.  The showers and toilets are run off a generator that uses gas: at $4.69 a gallon and being 16 miles away from real civilization, you use things sparingly.  The "Office" was an old trailer, beaten to death by years of harsh sun, wind and winters.  Inside you could hear the gnawing of the office pet, a pack rat somewhere in the walls.  Jessica, the young and willowy plains girl with long brown hair tightly braided and huge blue eyes that got bigger with every emotion,  laughed that if they ever found the hide-out of that pack rat, they'd probably find thousands of dollars of gems.

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We chose to do the shoveling and sifting system for a whole 2 days rather than the back-breaking crawling and scraping in a hot pit or the short-lived assembly line.  First of all, there is no breezy air in the pit, it’s hot and stifling and you get tired, parched and cranky rather quickly.  If you decide to do the one hour quick line for your money-same price as getting to dig/sift all day, then it’s over and you have nothing else to do for the next 24 hours and that may not sound too bad to some but we could not get cell phone service, there’s no tv or radio and you can only read so much in the wind.  So you would just sit for the rest of the day, or wander around.  One stroll around the mine camp which takes about fifteen minutes and you’ve seen everything.  And there’s NOTHING for miles and miles and miles but sage brush covered dessert with the mesas and plateaus far, far away.

The first day there we were amongst a handful of other visitors, six of us all together.  As the day grew later, the two gentlemen that were standing and sifting left with two good sized prizes, they found some reds!  The other two were older gals that stayed in the cabin next to ours and they had decided to pay for their cabin ($45.00) and dig in a hole for free.  They found  some sunstones but not as many as we did and a few shillers.

  

We chose to do the shoveling and sifting system for a whole 2 days rather than the back-breaking crawling and scraping in a hot pit or the short-lived assembly line.  First of all, there is no breezy air in the pit, it’s hot and stifling and you get tired, parched and cranky rather quickly.  If you decide to do the one hour quick line for your money-same price as getting to dig/sift all day, then it’s over and you have nothing else to do for the next 24 hours and that may not sound too bad to some but we could not get cell phone service, there’s no tv or radio and you can only read so much in the wind.  So you would just sit for the rest of the day, or wander around.  One stroll around the mine camp which takes about fifteen minutes and you’ve seen everything.  And there’s NOTHING for miles and miles and miles but sage brush covered dessert with the mesas and plateaus far, far away.

The first day there we were amongst a handful of other visitors, six of us all together.  As the day grew later, the two gentlemen that were standing and sifting left with two good sized prizes, they found some reds!  The other two were older gals that stayed in the cabin next to ours and they had decided to pay for their cabin ($45.00) and dig in a hole for free.  They found some sunstones but not as many as we did and a few shillers.

So the day started with the sun blasting daylight through the tiny, two-paned sliding glass window somewhere around O’Light-thirty, or more like 6:30 a.m.  When you go to bed at 9:00 you tend to get up a little early.  No alarm clocks, just nature waking you up with a light gong.  Kevin proceeded to make us a breakfast of pancakes and hot coffee, they were pretty darn good if I say so myself.  They were light and fluffy and bured in syrup and butter, they were a king’s fare out there for sure.

The first day we were there we started late, long after lunch and only got a few short hours of shovel and sift in so this next day was a full one!  We were out at the piles by 8:30 and even though the pamphlet says “9:00 to 5:00”, we were on country time.  Jessica informed us she was usually out and about by 9:30 and hoped we wouldn’t mind.  That was when I said to her, “No worries, girl, we’re all on country time out here”, to which she replied in her cute Marilyn Monroe diction, “Oh, I am sooo glad you understand!”

Kevin decided he was going to attempt a crawl and scrape in The Bears’ Den before it got too hot, a huge pit littered with screens and buckets and shovels and mounds of sifted dirt.  And no breeze.  And bugs.  I chose the gravel mounds with shovel and sift style, I had already had a few good hits on that.  Jessica did say we could wander around and try just about any mound we wanted to and that later on in the day she and Terry would start up the huge monster screen-belt and give us a 15 minute run on the conveyor.  I stayed on “our” piles for about 2 hours and decided to try my luck where the two men had gotten their reds.  Somehow though, it didn’t feel comfortable and I didn’t seem to have as good a luck at getting sunstones there, even though I was using a water hose on this—I ended up getting more wet and dirty than the sifting tray.  I moved back to my home pile. 

The first shovel full in my screen landed with a puff of dirt blowing away beneath the screen and after the dirt settled, right there on top of my gravelly pyramid, like a cherry on top of a sundae, was the biggest stone I’d seen yet, almost two inches long and one inch wide.  Holy cow, I couldn’t believe it!  I snatched it up and ran like a giggling little kid over to where Jessica and Terry were setting up the screen-machine-conveyer belt.  “Look!! It’s HUGE!” I was jumping and hopping like a 12 year old.  “Oh I know it’s not a red but it’s BIG and it has a schiller!!’    Yep, somewhere under the cracks and scrapings was a bit of iridescent peach shiller.

 Shortly after this event Kevin finally crawled out of the Bears’ Den pit with a small haul, nothing big and he was just tired and hot.  He also tried out the pile that delivered the big red stones and used the hose but he eventually came home to roost on our ‘home’ digs, too.   It wasn’t long after that when Jessica asked if we would like to try the conveyer belt for 15 minutes, it wasn’t regular fare but by this time of the day, Kevin and I were the only visitors left so we were offered the treat. 

They start up the big engine with a huge generator (more gas!) and the large rocks from the dump truck on the left fall into a bin that dumps them onto a caged belt, they run uphill and get separated from all the small rocks that get channeled down a chute to our water-covered white belt.  And the fun begins!  Terry sits at the funnel and keeps it going with  his hands so the gravel doesn’t all bunch up and clog the system, the rocks fall onto the belt and Kevin and I scrambled to pick the sunstone gems off without losing any.  Jessica was on Kevins’ right side keeping the water running on the belt so the gems would show up.   Of course we felt like Lucy and Ethel in that old show about the chocolate factory (and who hasn’t seen that one?)—going so fast it almost made you dizzy.   I did find a good sized rock, about ¾ of an inch all the way around with a red dot in it, it was pretty big as the norm goes and we were excited to find that one.  That one we’ll have cut and faceted, don’t know how it will look yet and it will take awhile.  Might be worth about $60.00 when all is said and done.  But that isn’t what counts, it’s all the fun and memories we had that will go into it that will make it special for us.

There were about two hours left of country digging/sifting time so we headed back to our home pile and resumed speed.  Nothing as big as the one I found earlier and nothing with color like what we snagged off the belt but still a good time and putting in the hours.

It wasn’t all about the prize at the end, though.  There were so many ingredients in this trip that made it all a special event.  The huge expanse of bright blue sky and wispy clouds, the changing breeze that kept you cool while standing out in the hot sun—that made it bearable indeed—the mother raven that flew out on food recon every 1 and ½ hours to feed her rather large brood of three squawking babies.  There were also red-winged blackbirds flitting in and about the sage brush, even a meadow lark stopped by to sing a girl-searching tune and flew off when “she” didn’t show.  There were jack rabbits zig-zagging along the game trails and desert lizards would pop up on a sun-scorched boulder to see what we were up to.   Kevin got buzzed by a small dust devil and I was so focused in my thoughts that I forgot to re-apply my sunscreen.  There is a sunburn on parts that haven’t seen the sun since last summer…ouch!

Finally it was time to close up shop and shut down for the day, we were both dirty and dusty and sweaty and probably even a little stinky.  The thought of a shower was invigorating but we soon heard that they just couldn’t get the propane to light.  Probably that dust devil had a hand in that, too.  So, when handed lemons you make lemonaid.

Back at our cabin and truck, Kevin boiled up enough water for me to add some of our cold to make 3 gallons of bath water in a big yellow bucket.  It was fantastic!  But first I used those pre-packaged wipes and tried to get most of the dirt off, then dipped my washcloth in and started with the face.  Oh I’m telling you, it was one of the best parts of the day,  besides having our spaghetti dinner.  Never did that clean, hot water feel as good as it did then, literally showering over the bucket.  One does what one can with what one has….

But what was the topper to this whole trip?  Getting up at 2:00 a.m to see the sky!  Twenty six miles from the nearest light source (which is completely shut down by 10:00 p.m.), it is magical!  The sky is actually lighter than the ground due to the stars, and the Milky Way is so wide it covered 1/3 of it with its expanse.  You just won’t get that unless you are away from light pollution.   Then there was the quiet.  People say it’s deafening.  Well I don’t know about deafening but it’s certainly THERE.  You feel it.  And so I went to back to bed on that lumpy ol’ futon and felt blessed to have experienced Earths’ gifts.

And then there was the sunset.  After cleaning up and having dinner, we took an evening stroll to watch the sun set on that far ridge.  It was calm, no wind and the sage was just powerful; desert perfume indeed.  Brilliant bits of sunstone glittered on the dirt road like pieces of fire strewn about by the Greek god Hephaestus. 

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My First Car

 Oh THE first car. 

Not MY first car but the first car that was 'mine', was a 1963 or '64 Plymouth and dad paid $300.00 for it, a pretty good deal at the time, I'm sure.  It was sky blue with the same color interior and it had a push button ignition!  That was cool, nobody else had a push button dashboard. Push button windshield wipers and headlights, too.  Now, it certainly wasn't the car I learned to drive in, that was a 1954 Chevrolet.  Looked like a big box with wheels, kind of like babies' feet, no shape, just something that gets you from point A to point B.  Still, for a 17 year old girl, it was freeeedom!
 
One weekend I spent washing and waxing it, cleaning the interior and getting it all as spiffy looking as I could so it wasn't too much of an embarrassment to drive or be recognized in since there were a few dings in it.  It didn't look too bad by the time I was done, other than the missing hubcap.

  I remember coming home from school one day and as I walked closer and closer to the driveway, I could see spots all over my car.  Literally SPOTS, great big forest green spots!  "What the heck is that?" I'm thinking.  The closer I got the bigger the spots were and I simply could not figure out how they got there, they weren't there when I left that morning (must have been some reason why I couldn't drive it yet...).
Later that evening when I could catch my dad alone,  I asked him what happened to the car and why were there big green spots all over it?  "Well, I took a can of whatever spray paint I had and spray painted all the rust spots, honey!" 

Oh! My! Gosh! You! Didn't, Dad!!!  Why on earth would you do something like that?  I waxed it, Dad!  "Well, wouldn't want that thing to rot out from underneath you now".
At the time, I thought that was the stupidist thing I had ever heard.  Besides, it wasn't like it was a NEW car.  And it wasn't going to fall to pieces underneath me because I wouldn't have it that long, Daaaaad. 

Luckily, I didn't get that car until right after I graduated from school, so no one I knew would see me driving it.  Or so I thought...

  I drove that for two weeks until I got tired of hearing how I was the owner of the clown car, everyone I knew seemed to see me in that Dr. Seuss car.  So another weekend came and I spent that weekend taking an SOS pad and scrubbing EVERY SINGLE one of those green spots off!  It was hard and it took me almost the whole weekend, but by gosh, by Monday my car was all one color again and "spiffy" just like before.
I find it slightly amusing that that car survived ME and I eventually sold it for $200.00.   That summer, I played with that car!  I used to take it out with my childhood buddy, Chris, and we'd go drive to places we'd never been to before.  Once we drove out into the country, out by Lawrence Livermore Labratory, when there were still rolling green hills and cows in the fields.  We found another place that had been used by others in Jeeps, they didn't really have ATV's back then in 1972.  We thought it would be fun to try some of those hills until I high-centered it once and that was the last time I went joy riding like that.  I do not remember how we got it off the mound, probably a safety valve in my mind because the reality was too scary.

But you know, that little car took me to my first job that summer after graduating, it took me to my boyfriends' house and to the store and all those myriad trips we have to make when we first get our license.  I loved driving, never got tired of hopping in it to go somewhere.  And I bet I even cruised the boulevard in Walnut Creek at least once.   I know I did when I got my REAL cool car, the one I paid for...

But it wasn't until years later as Dad and I were sitting and reminiscing about our youth--and his first car was a Model T!--I spoke up about those gigantic, hideous green spray painted spots he put on that car.  "Well.." he says, "You know why I did that, don't you?"  Uh..duh dad.  So the rust spots wouldn't grow. 

"I did that so I could easily find your car anywhere in town...".  Yes Dad, now I understand.  I still love you and I still miss  you.   Bless you for loving me!  (:

@#$%! Modern Hostage Taking by Inanimate Objects

This morning I was once again a prisoner of the modern age. 
This seems to be happening more and more often.  First it was a tv and not being able to decipher between 4 different remotes which one would turn the dang thing on and my first ranting of, "Whatever happened to SIMPLE?  I just want to turn the tv ON!".  That was over 7 years ago. 
The next hostage event was just last year with the washing machine.
We had a front loader.  Once you lock your program down, that's it for the duration, no matter if you left a thousand dollar bill in your pocket or  your last photo of your great-great-grandmother, you W-I-L-L N-O-T access that item until THE MACHINE has completed it's cycle.  Why?  Because you'd flood your floor if you opened the door.  It seemed to happen a lot and it does when you are a little older; you forget to take something out of  your pockets, although having a clean lip balm is rather nice as long as it doesn't make it into the dryer, then it's not pretty.  I now have a top-loading (BUT water-saving!!) washing machine--which I still have to babysit so I can have PLENTY of rinse water for my clothes; otherwise they get shredded in about 3 cups of rinse water, almost like scrubbing  your clothes on a rock--but I can fix that by putting the cycle back on wash and filling the tub with PLENTY of water and turning it back to rinse. Ha ha, Whirlpool, you can't fool me!!
And today?  I was held hostage by a porn video on my cellphone!!  Uh huh, that's what I said.  I had just received a text message from my son and it was literally INTERRUPTED by an urgent notice informing me I had an incoming text video.  I sort of assumed that it was Mike sending a photo of something and when it first loaded, it looked like two hands being  held.  Then the audio began and it was a strange mix of oohing and cooing.  So, having had a few friends who just had babies, I thought someone was sending me a video of a parent grasping a babies' hand with the baby making those cute little baby noises.
AND THEN IT GOT GRAPHIC!!
Oh oh, that's NO BABY, I said to myself, oh my that's NOT FROM MICHAEL, either!!
I hurriedly STOPPED the video which seemingly incurred the wrath of THE MACHINE and all of a sudden my phone was totally incapacitated.  There was a blank white screen and on the front of my phone the message read: PLEASE WAIT WHILE THE APPLICATION IS BEING DISABLED.
Twenty minutes of disability.
I could not turn the phone off, I could not change the effect by pushing any other button whatsoever.
I was trapped by a silent moaning nasty.  And then I got mad.  I couldn't call anyone because...they're all locked inside my cell phone!  I had to disconnect my computer and thank heavens for call forwarding because I called the hubby on his cell phone from the land line (which was forwarded to  his cell phone) and I got a hold of a friendly human.  "Kevin, I have a porno video on my phone and it won't let go of me!"....."What?"...I said: I got a porno video and it has taken over my phone and won't let me shut down or do anything on the phone.  And here comes the voice of confidence and reason, "Well, just take the back off the phone and take out the battery", he says.  "How do you do that?" I asked.  As Hubby went into the diatribe of the how-to, I lost my tracking and all the things he was saying didn't make any sense.  "Oh, I'll just figure it out, bye!".  Because he's at work, the poor guy is probably still wondering what is going on. 
After I calm down and the brain starts to click in, I got back online with the computer and emailed my daughter for her brothers' phone number, once I received that, I was about to call my son when, miracle of miracles, my cell phone rings and it breaks the back of Little Miss Porn Star.  Hooray!!
I had tried to remove the back of the cell phone but apparently that only works when you accidentally drop the phone.  When Michael came over (because he was listening to his hysterical and freaking out mother), he immediately deleted the offending message--so no, I do not know who sent it--but showed me how simple it was to remove the back cover.  Without dropping it.

Life! I Want To Be Here...

Saturday, March 3rd;

I was at work and around 4:30 during lunch I began to experience a lump in my throat. Like taking your thumb and pushing in right at the "hole". As I went back to my department I described a feeling of my lungs hurting to my immediate boss, Gina. She left at 5:00 and I was on my own. As I was working I began to experience shortness of breath along with the other stuff and terrible heartburn (which I had been experiencing for 2 days already). If I moved too fast I would feel lightheaded (no nausea tho') and I also started to experience disorientation; I could barely concentrate on a simple task and my nightly routine was another thing I couldn't keep in order.

At 6:00 p.m. Mike came in after he got off work and it seemed the moment I saw him I just 'let go', felt secure, you know? I told him to call Kevin and describe my symptoms and to call the hospital to see if I should go in, Kevin said I needed to get to the E.R. immediately--twice. I called a floor supervisor and told them (and I had already called them earlier to ask if I could go home early because I wasn't feeling well) that I was dropping everything and that my son was here and I was headed to the E.R.

Got to the E.R. at 6:30--got lost because I couldn't recognize things in the dark--they took me in and hooked me up with the ekg, took about 3 vials of blood and proceeded to monitor me. They gave me one nitro glycerin pill and within seconds it took away all the symptoms for about a half an hour. They gave me another one and that lasted for 30 minutes as well. Then they gave me a cocktail of Maalox and xylocain to numb the esophagus and that was the one that stopped all of them. They then suggested it was either angina or spasms of the esophagus and I was to stay there until 10:30 when they would take another blood sample to be sure. I was discharged at midnight and everything stable.

I have a doctors’ appointment on March 14^th, 2012 for further information.

The Blessings of Old Friends

What a wonderful gift friends are.  Sometimes when friends separate due to life’s interference, the friendship fades away. The memories are still there, the love and caring is still there, but the people are miles and ‘times’ away.

Some of the wonderful things about the internet, email and Facebook are that you can still feel “right there” so that when you do get a chance touch base with your friends, it feels just like they or you never left.  This day I had the chance to reconnect with one of my very special friends in life, Laura.  I stayed with her at her house when I visited Alaska last year.  Laura is a very sweet soul, kind-hearted, giving, funny and loyal.  You don’t get too many of those in your lifetime.

Laura’s daughter lives in Redmond, about 20 minutes north of Bend and she was down here “on the outside” visiting.  I told her I would take her out to lunch, my treat, so we could have a little time together.  All Laura had to do was give me the address and I would enter it into my GPS and that those directions would lead me right to Kimmie’s front door.  Oh I would have never found Kimmie’s place with pen and paper, I am directionally dyslexic.  I don’t know if that’s a word but it IS a condition. 

So when I showed up and rang the doorbell, Laura opened the door and the first thing she said was, “You made it!  It worked!”, her expression was cute.

She invited me in and we sat in Kimmie’s living room and had a soda, chatted for awhile and took some pictures and off we went to have lunch at Mazatlan.  We celebrated and saluted our friendship and meeting with a wonderfully delicious margarita.   We then ordered CHICKEN chimichangas but when they arrived, they both were beef!  We just thought the heck with it, we didn’t want to wait anymore and they were good so we let that one go.

Of course, the visit wasn’t long enough and we soon had to part—mainly because the both of us got the ‘sleepies’ and we wanted to go home and take a nap!  Ah, the graciousness of true good friends…

I’ll see you again Laura, and thank you for being my friend.  

Yay Snow!!

Snow, finally.  It has been a long and ugly winter.  Nice and cold, not too bad as winters go, but relatively snow-free until the 28th of February/first of March, then it melted and now snow again on the 12th.  Mostly sunny skies and a bleak, coffee brown landscape.  I'll call it the come and go snow season.
There they stood in the box in my room.  Snowshoes.  Patiently waiting to be exercised again.  Just waiting.  Once in awhile I thought I could hear them scratching the sides of their long, dark cardboard tomb.  But that was just my imagination.
And then on that Thursday, the 1st of March, I hauled them out of storage, stepped outside into the bright sunshine and strapped them on before the snow could melt.  I didn't want to miss this one!
They say that you can burn 500 calories in an hour while snowshoeing.  You can burn 200 calories just trying to get them on!  It took a few times of rearranging my feet and the shoes before I finally remembered which way they were supposed to go.  Next time, I'll take pictures and create my own directions of "How To Put On Snowshoes". You know, "TGIF", as in toes-go-in-front.
I was almost feeling guilty that I wasn't up on the mountain, really getting my workout.  On the other hand, I have two acres of my own to plow around and I live two miles from the state park AND I saved gas by NOT driving 40+ miles to go 'hike'.  I really did walk around the property and as soon as I finished that, I didn't have any more trip guilt.  Then I took off up the snowy road we live on and walked about a half a mile--there and back--and was thoroughly guilt free.  You don't have to drive miles and miles to go have fun or get that workout, you can do it right in your own front yard!  And with all that snow and the beautiful day, it was just as wonderful as going out into the wilderness, except the coffee is a lot closer.  I am sure I earned that 500 calorie donut by the time I clomped back up on the deck.
Cheers!