In search of Palm Canyon…

December 23, 2018December 23, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday we decided to do a hike to find out where all these lovely stones come from, to a place called Palm Canyon, which is the only place in Arizona that native palm trees exist. The canyon is part of the Kofa mountain range. To make a long story short, Volcano, volcano, 25 million years, then earthquake….. then erosion.

We have come back to this area, over and over, as it is so breathtaking…. but I can never quite capture this in my pictures with my phone, perhaps we shall get a new camera so we can share the beauty of this area with everyone else. So if you look closely at the picture below you can see the windy road heading into the dark area at the centre of the mountains. It almost seemed to have a fairy tale feel to it, a windy road leading to a craggy rock cliff with a castle on it. THAT is where we are going..

This is looking into the canyon from just outside.

So as you get into the canyon, suddenly everything becomes lush, and there are plenty of plants that we have not seen anywhere else. For instance, HOLLY, which we have never seen down here, and represented a whole new issue for Tucker. (can you imagine walking on Holly with bare feet)

Well we climbed higher and higher up the canyon, in search of palm trees…

THEN the trail started to look more like this…. It essentially disappeared and we were just trying to find a way upwards. It started to become more like rock climbing and there were a few places where we COULD have maybe used some rope…

It was starting to get a little scary… and I was thinking to myself that this hardly seemed the kind of trail that they considered mild to moderate in the brochure, and only suggested bringing water. We had seen NO sign of Palm trees, and the people who HAD been coming behind is never seemed to get any closer, they just went back. 🤔 🤔 🤔 So I said to Ken, this seems like more than a half a mile. He said that it HAD said a mile in. So I pulled out the pamphlet and read it AGAIN.

It SAID about half way up the canyon (1/2 of a mile) there is a sign that says palms with an arrow point towards the palms. WE HAD seen the sign, and thought it was pointing to where the trail led. So we hiked half way DOWN the canyon and found the sign and sure enough it was pointing up a narrow crack between 2 cliffs… to, sure enough, ….the palms….

So for certain you would have to be standing right there to see them. You go into the canyon from west to east, and this little crack goes north. I guess it also explains how the trees survive there, they are sheltered from all sides and they have this canyon pointing directly south.

So we laughed all the way back to the parking lot.

I have tried to include more “awake” pictures of Tucker, as so many people commented on how tired he looked. I was just taking a picture of every extremely uncomfortable place he seemed to fall asleep.

Another funny story of the day was the intense echoing you got in the canyon. When we were WAY up the canyon, we felt like we had microphones on. Then part way down, Tucker barked at something, and we could not stop him from barking, because he kept hearing another dog.

Much love…. thanks for reading, Janet… and Ken and Tucker.

All that glitters, is not broken beer bottles

December 2, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ 2 Comments

Our rockhounding outings usually follow some sort of a similar script. We go to our rather “extensive” library of rockhounding books. Find the book/books for the state we are in and find a site near where we are.

We then have a look at a map that looks something like this:

I/WE then study the map and say “yup… looks pretty straightforward” “Just turn onto 4th street in Palo Verde and go 5 miles west.” At this point we usually leave the book behind because it seemed SOOOO straightforward. Then you get out there and there ARE no roads heading west, there is one going south west, and so you take that one thinking that perhaps writer was just vague… So you follow THAT road for about 7 miles. Now I should tell you here that the term “road” is also somewhat ambiguous. It can mean many things. It can look like this:

Or something like this:

And you never really know if you are just following the tracks of some crazed ATVer……

And then when you come to something like this you KNOW you have been following a crazed ATVer…. WHOOPS dead end.

At the end of a wash. To fully understand the area, you have to take into account that when it rains a lot in a short time the water takes out the roads and leaves you with “washes” which are basically “part time” rivers. So we hike up to get some sort of an idea of where we are, and at the top of the hill, there is just a bunch of OTHER hills. The glitter is just the sun shining off of the Rhyolite…. no beer bottles. We have found that when we are searching for a site, and come across broken beer bottles… that we must be close, because at least someone else has found this place. I can only imagine what broken beer bottles and rockhounding have in common…. but Broken Beer bottles = you are close!

So when you look out at a landscape like this you have to think how easy it would be to lose the JEEP….

JEEP, what jeep…? 🙂 Makes me think of Fargo. It was down one of these dips 🤔

NOTE to self, NEVER forget where you left the jeep.

ON this particular day we did not find the place they were talking about, but on the way back we DID see a road that DID actually go west, that MIGHT be the one we were looking for… I guess another day.

I wish I had better camera skills, or perhaps a better camera (I just use my phone, or iPad) But these mountains are truly breathtaking. These are the mountains within the KOFA wilderness refuge, and with the jeep we were able to drive right up into the centre of this HUGE area, so see these mountains from the other sides. Having the jeep is definitely worthwhile getting us to places we would never have gotten to without it. The motorhome just sits in one place for a few weeks, while we take side trips in the jeep.

The area in the centre of this range was more green than anywhere we have been locally. Apparently there was more rainfall in October than is usual as well

And as usual we are eating well. We bought a Paella pan last year thinking it would fit in the small motorhome oven. WE did have to make some minor adjustments to make it fit…. but had our first vegetarian Paella. I used my roasted tomato sauce instead of the canned tomatoes that the recipes all call for, and I think it was the very best Paella we have ever had. Peas from our garden as well.

Today we head off into the Palo Verde wilderness in search of….. broken beer bottles.

MUCH LOVE to those who “travel” along with us. Janet

Rockhounding and religion

November 27, 2018November 27, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ 2 Comments

I see rockhounding as a lot like religion. We can spend hours out there climbing, hiking, getting lost….. anything.. as long as we BELIEVE there is something out there to be found. (even when we find nothing) 🙂 Some days we even lose each other, like yesterday. We have a loose agreement, and walk some distance from each other, and every now and then if we do not see the other we start loud whistling or calling out. Yesterday the wind was loud, so likely took our whistles and yells into the hills. Another game we play is to ask Tucker where the other one is. I kept saying to Tucker, “WHERE IS KEN?”… and he kept looking….

Don’t you love his bandana? Although it really is his colour, it actually has a useful purpose. That is to cool him off. We keep it wet and it aids in cooling him. and then FINALLY>>>>>>>THERE IS KEN!

Granted, this game DOES work better on the beach.

OTHER things one might find in the desert, are ………Gypsy wagons. Friends/neighbours from Bandon, in Quartzite. Amber and Elton are heading east, we are heading west, and we met in quartzite.

Now this wonderful Gypsy wagon, Amber has built over many years and each year she continues to modify.

She is holding her time machine, a box she has created from odds and ends of little brass bits that once had a totally different use. Inside this tiny wagon, they even have an old stove that they use to burn pine cones to heat them up on cold nights.

How could you get cold in such a cozy spot?

“Celestine” is clearly a work of art.

Great to run into old friends along the way. We spent Thanksgiving just north of Phoenix with friends from Canada.

OTHER THINGS you might run into in Quartzite….. ONE STOP SHOP for everything you could possibly need to show that you are___________________________ 🙂

But then you get out of town again…

We have been on the road for almost a month now and FINALLY getting into the groove.

Much love to all, thanks for following our travels.

Janet

Beatty and Bullets AZ…

November 25, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

“After a thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, we didn’t wake up until the next morning ” to head west. Well north and then west. We are in Beatty Az now, and we pulled up to our usual place off in the desert. There was another rig there, so we gave them LOTs of space and parked a few hundred yards away. We were just getting out and looking around when there was a series of gun shots.

Well we are kind of used to this having lived for 13 years in Rural Oregon, but not in this situation. Our dog is petrified of the sound, and I think we are a bit uneasy…. SO we packed up and moved to the location, in these pictures. In retrospect, I was thinking…… what a great way to keep an area to yourself 🙂 Just fire off several rounds of bullets whenever someone else shows up.

Tucker took all of his toys OUT Of the motorhome, and left them all around, he clearly liked the new “digs” better…..

We actually went to Wickenburg, on Black Friday, shopping for GEODES 🙂 (then we came to Beatty.

Geodes are…. “a rock containing a cavity lined with crystals or other mineral matter.” this is a wonderful article with great pictures to show how they form GEODES

What we are finding each year we rock hound is that each year we get better at spotting certain characteristics: You can see in this lower left one a bubbly sort of outside… “Botryoidal”, is the geology term for bubbly.

Sometimes only a few bubbles…

SOME BIG bubbles…

Then PRESTO…..beautiful crystals inside. Some you crack open and nothing inside. For the most part, we are trying to leave them all intact, so we can cut them properly with a saw when we get to Quartzite… or when we get home.

We are getting back in to Cactus territory, so once again looking for booties for Tucker….. turns out what we are going to need to do is to order them and have them delivered to a USP in a town we are planning on getting to. They are a very specialty item and though stores SAY that they carry them, what they mean is that they can GET THEM IN…. which is not much use to travellers.

Although I failed to get a decent picture, we were recently at a gas station and while wandering around I found a series of bird nests in very prickly cacti… … Could not help but wonder how the little ones learning to fly must be VERY accurate taking off.

Well expect to get some DAZZLING Pictures this year from Brenda. In previous years we could only get SO far out to find rocks, as the motorhome is NOT a 4×4, and we could only go SO far in the bikes, because Tucker would get TUCKERED OUT.

Now we just leave the motorhome on one place and go to all the other places with the Jeep.

A Shock….ing story

January 21, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

Back when we were in Kingman, Ken came around the back of the rig, while filling up with gas, and there was a guy under our motorhome. EEEK.. Well it turns out that he had been following us and noticed how dreadful our shocks were. He just HAPPENED to have a mobile “replacing shocks” service.
Now although we were very leery, we also had been wanting to change the shocks and it is always extremely complicated to get anything done on our rig (as you will see in this story)…. so we went with it. I got the cash and insisted Ken stay with them the whole time. (after the disastrous brake situation where the guy put one of the callipers on wrong).
So we pulled into the parking lot of a mall, and they got the correct size measurements and one of them went off to purchase them. He came back and within an hour we had brand new shocks on the back of the rig, and it all went well. Kind of funny, as we were driving away, we could see them following another older motorhome…

This blog does not have any associated pictures so I thought I would intersperse a few from the gem show. This is tigers eye from Australia.

SOOOOOO then we decided we wanted to get the shocks replaced for the front. Ken figured he would do it himself.
We were in Parker AZ. Ken found an online ad for a store in Parker, and gave the guy the measurements, and he said that they would be in the next day by 4 and the shop closed at 5.
We went up to Lake Havasu for the day to visit friends and rushed back to Parker in time to get the shocks. We could not find the store, and so Ken phoned again and turns out that the store WAS in Lake Havasu city, where we had been all day. SHEEsh. So then he figured what the heck, and decided to drive up the next day to pick up the shocks anyways (about 35 miles..) He got there and they had ordered the wrong size.
So we hung around another day, deciding to really solve this problem and once more they got the wrong size in. So we decided to give up on this place… and move on down to Quartzite. He went into a shop there and ordered the part and was quite specific….. but once again the wrong park came in.

This is a massive ?? Jasper piece from Australia, the rocks that come from these far away places, they ship them over.

Finally finally … he resorted to the OLD FARTS forum, and one of the guys “BILL” coming to the Safari rally ordered the shocks, picked them up in Havasu and brought them to the rally. They were the correct ones. Ken had a hard time getting one of the old ones off and so “BILL” had the compressor tool to take it off, Ken got them off, put on the new ones and now we have 4 new shocks. So the morale of this long story, is that sometimes…. things that seem pretty weird, work out.

This some of the jewelry that our friends from Hawthorn AZ their shop is called ROCK CHUCK, have made. They do the mining, cut the cabochons AND make the jewelry. These pieces are a mixture of the various gems they mine. Turquoise, and varicite are the two I recognize.

HUGE ammonites from morocco

We have officially said goodbye to Quartzite and are heading up to Havasu to drop off the rental car. It will be great, because it is not much fun driving in 2 vehicles, Tucker gets lonely, he IS a 2 person dog, AND it has not been very useful. We WILL work out something different next year.

BYE for now

ALL MY LOVE

janet

KOFA… and the YUMA proving grounds

January 17, 2018January 17, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

We have spent a few days at different parts of KOFA national wildlife reserve. It was established in 1939 to protect the desert bighorn sheep, following a campaign by the Arizona boy scouts. Major Burnham who was a frontiersman, and become and conservationist observed that the populations of bighorn sheep were sharply declining and encouraged the boy scouts to take up the campaign. For 2 years, 10,000 boy scouts campaigned through a “save the bighorn” poster contest. The name KOFA, was derived from an acronym of one of the areas most notable mines the King OF Arizona gold mine. Oddly though, hunting IS allowed for the big horn sheep, but limited.

The mountain range although not particularly high, is extremely rugged, so provides excellent habitat for plant and animals adapted to the harsh desert climate.

The larger mammals like the bighorn sheep and mule deer find refuge from the heat in the caves. We did not actually see any wildlife, as we stayed outside the refuge with the road looking a little much for our rig. The closest we came was Tucker found a shell of a tortoise. Looks like a piece of paper in front of him…

These area are all close to each other, Brenda, Quartzite Blythe. While hiking around Brenda, we were hearing VERY loud sounds…. ….. Guessing we thought they sounded like thunder, or the sound a jet makes when it overcomes the speed of sound (sonic boom). We just did not get what these sounds were. We thought we might come over the next ridge to see that a huge bomb had been dropped.

We put it all together yesterday, hearing these sounds again, realizing that they actually DO test bombs at Yuma proving grounds, which is adjacent to the KOFA wildlife reserve.

Interesting bedfellows? The first area we camped alongside the KOFA mountain range, we had to travel 5 miles along a road going through the proving grounds.

I did not get a picture of the sign as you start into this. It basically said that you were not allowed to stop for any reason over the next 5 miles, as it was military property. Driving south from Quartzite to Yuma, there was a figure in the air that you could see for at least 40 miles in each direction. When we stopped to camp for the night we looked up and OMG, of all the places we could have chosen to camp for the night, we were directly below it. Tucker looked up and barked at it. Ken looked with binoculars and it is attached by cables and the whole lower part of it is cameras…… hmmmm

Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) is a United States Army facility and one of the largest military installations in the world. Situated in southwestern La Pas county and western in southwestern Yuma county approximately the proving ground REALLY IS used for testing military equipment. And here I thought we would be safe by avoiding malls and theatres.

In a typical year, over 500,000 artillery, mortar, and missile rounds are fired, 36,000 parachute drops take place, 200,000 miles (320,000 km) are driven on military vehicles, and over 4000 air sorties are flown from the proving ground’s Laguna military airfield. Though about 90 percent of the proving ground’s workload is devoted to the test and evaluation of weapon systems and munitions, training activities are important. Dozens of units visit the proving ground each year for realistic desert training, especially before deploying overseas.

With regards to the blimp, I found this information. We had thought it was to do with Yuma Proving ground, but turns out it is more about border surveillance.

“For the past two decades, a large aerostat balloon maintained by the U.S. Air Force has rivaled Castle Dome as a fixed point of reference over the southern portion of YPG’s range.
Providing an important link in the “radar fence” along the international border that detects drug-smuggling airplanes, the same principle has been applied to supporting American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For nearly a year, motorists traveling the isolated stretch of Highway 95 that passes through the northern-most section of Yuma Proving Ground have been treated to the site of several more white blimps floating high above the desert floor. They look quaint and placid as they hover, but these dirigibles are being rigorously prepared for action overseas.

Persistent Ground Surveillance Systems (PGSS) marry the most cutting-edge, high-tech detection sensors to an inexpensive platform: an ordinary blimp. The moored lighter-than-air craft float as high as 3,000 feet above the ground, lofting a sensor suite that allows ground controllers to continuously monitor a huge swath of land.”

Which would explain the ever apparent border patrol vehicles.

Ken and I were looking for a certain rock site 2.5 miles south of ” STONE CABIN”, and the directions in the book were a little vague, so I drove the car back up to get my bearings from STONE CABIN and had to go through a border patrol inspection site, complete with dogs etc. This site is permanent between Yuma and Quartzite. I was wondering what they thought about us going back and forth through the site …… looking for a rock site.

Although I do not believe my photos do it justice, these mountains are the most spectacular that we have seen on this trip.

AND then the kitchen sink drain started to leak…..

…. and one more BRAND NEW part to our motor home, gradually we are getting a new motorhome.

MUCH LOVE TO ALL

Janet

Fire Agates

January 14, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

Ken and I have become quite interested in Fire agates after finding them at Saddle mountain and near Oatman, Arizona. One might say we have become obsessed……

I should note here that we did not find our treasures in precisely the place the book outlined that we would. Perhaps we were….. thinking outside the box. Turning left instead of right, on one side of the road instead of the other….

It has been hard to envision how the rough form of Fire agate becomes the gems seen in many booths at quartzsite.

rough one of mine… thin layers will need to be removed.

rough of mine

gems at quartzsite

Just google ” fire agates” to see much better photos of them. I HAVE tried stealing pictures off the internet, but am not computer savvy enough to figure out how to do it.

What we have discovered is that there is a little more work involved in getting the rough stone down to the fire agate gem.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Edgar B. Heylmun, PhD 2002 (of course I HAVE corrected his spelling of the word colour) 🙂

“Agate nodules are created when silica, in solution, enters and slowly fills a gas cavity in volcanic rocks. Agate and volcanic rocks have more porosity and permeability than what meets the eye, and layer upon layer of silica is deposited in the cavity until it is filled. Agate may also be deposited in seams and fractures in volcanic rocks. The mineralized solutions were probably formed during the cooling of the volcanic rocks, though considerable silica could be deposited over the years by cold circulating ground water. The porosity of agate is demonstrated by the ease in which agate can be artifically coloured.

Fire agate is a challenge to cut and polish in such a way as to preserve the fire, so it is popular with lapidary artists. The fire is caused by a thin layer of iridescent iron oxide that was deposited in a botryoidal (bubbly) manner. The bubbly nature of the layer was probably caused by small gas bubbles that were later filled with silica and water. It is imperative that the layer of silica covering the iron oxide be clear. Otherwise, the fire would not be discovered. When grinding, a lot of delicate work is required, aided by microscopic examination. There may be several thin layers of iron oxide, each with fire of a different colour, so it is quite a challenge to cut and polish such material en cabochon. The principal flashes of fire are golden yellow to green, but some valuable specimens exhibit a brilliant red. Sometimes, fire is evident in specimens before any cutting is done. The iron oxide is hydrous, so water in the thin layer adds to the fire, as does water in inter-layered silica which may, in fact, be fire opal. One of the lapidary rules is to wet grind fire agate, not saw it.”

There is a “fire” that exists deep in the stone that you must grind/Dremel….. your way into without destroying the stone within. You must use diamond blades and Dremel tools …. but bearing in mind that diamonds are harder than agates, so if you go too far you destroy the “fire agate”.

This is one that I have found that has very little chalcedony covering the fire. I guess it was with this one that we began to understand the process.

I am thinking the process will be great fun, sort of like cleaning the garlic, you peel away the outside layers of the garlic to reveal the colours within. I LOVE that part of being a garlic grower.

… and flowers on the cactus…

Tucker pretending to be a coyote.

and Mr RV repairman KEN…. Kitchen sink was leaking yesterday, now we need to get a new drain. Piece by piece we are buying ourself a brand new RV…….. 🙂

I have struggled writing this Blog, because I did it 2 days ago, and went to post it and it disappeared Hard to write the same thing twice.

MUCH love to all

Janet

Biking and Brenda

January 9, 2018January 9, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

We are having a total blast with these bikes.

We have been experimenting with Tucker, as I realized that it is likely the heat that wears him out. It is not THAT hot here, but there is no real shade. So while we are out on the bikes, he finds whatever places he can for shade. We stop every 1 mile to give him a break, and water, and he seems to be doing better. Yesterday I tried a makeshift “cooling collar”, soaking wet facecloth, but he got it off, today we will try a wet scarf.

Scotch Creek (where we live) is a LOT hotter than this in the summer, but the trails we hike usually have lots of shake trees.

Also sticking to the “roads” which are basically very very rough 4×4 roads, he is not getting any cactus spines in his feet.

AND ME…. I am becoming a real mountain biker. Ken is amazed of the terrain I just weave my way through. BRAVE BRAVE Janet….. These fat tires just ride over everything, and I am now actually trying to steer around big rocks. Usually I see something scary and for some reason just steer straight towards it. I have not crashed in 3 whole days, amazing. The gravel is often quite thick, and with the pedal assist function, (and the fat tires) you just keep going through the gravel….. and yes fishtailing. Ken has this BIG smile on his face.

So each day we are heading out on the bikes, going anywhere from 2-3 miles out and stopping frequently to look for rocks, scenery etc… Having picnics….. getting back to the MH at about 3 in the afternoon. Then we clean all of our rocks, and try to keep only the best.

Which brings me to the part about rock graveyards.

Whenever we find more rocks, we have to go through what we already have and throw some out. So each place we camp, usually has a pile of “what we thought were treasures, but do not think are treasures anymore”. Often what you find today, makes yesterdays finds look like JUST ROCKS.

We CAN tell others do this too, in that often we find other rockhounds rock graveyards. Sometimes we pick through them for special rocks we do not have samples of, but usually end up throwing them away at the next stop. I am sure this entity will be very confusing to geologists in the future.

Well yesterday was laundry day…… and I was wondering what this guy had on his right hip….? Not seen one of those before, likely something to keep his quarters in 🙂

So once a week we go back into town (quartzite ) do the sani dump thing…. fill up with fresh water, drop off our small bags of garbage at the dump and do laundry. That took 2 hours and so we spent the afternoon looking at the thousands of rocks at the gem show which is on now in quartzite.

These are mexican fire agates, we are just learning about how to work with fire agates…. how to bring out the fire, which would be the dark spots on these. I fear my pictures never do the rocks justice.

and a lovely sink we bought for 150.00…. made of limestone from Morocco. We also looked at plates.

and some incredible tigers eye from Australia. Tigers eye is a chatoyant gemstone that the way the minerals align within the rock it gives a wavy type of appearance. Again I wish my pictures did the rocks justice.

The show that is on now is pretty large, and is called the Desert Gardens Gem and mineral show, and it goes the whole month and then from the 17th to the 21st is the HUGE QIA POWWOW which is all the same sellers that are here now, plus many many more. Many specialized rock people JUST come to the pow wow. At least that is how I understand it.

We have met sellers from India, Morocco, South Africa, Argentina, and TEXAS so far. It truly is fun just looking at all the rocks. We have lots of books for identifying the rocks we find, but just like I cannot do the rocks justice with pictures, it seems that neither can anyone else. Much better to see them LIVE. AND all the sellers are more than happy to tell you ALL about the rocks. Great place to learn.

Well back to sorting rocks.

Much love to everyone

Janet

Tucker tales and a story about a very very special person

January 5, 2018January 5, 2018 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

I decided to write a blog for Tucker. A friend suggested that dogs might be interested in what dogs are doing in Arizona with 2 rockhounding parents, in a motor home. Then I decided to add another important story.

Well to begin with, Tucker has more or less told us that he would rather chew his feet off than wear those F&)*)*&ing booties. WE remind him about his booties as we pull the cactus thorns (spines) out of his feet. To his credit though, he HAS gotten a whole lot better at avoiding them.

He carefully places his front feet, and then gets the hind feet in the same (safe) spot.

He has a new problem however, and that is where he sticks his NOSE….. In his diligent search for rabbits his nose goes down a fretfully large number of …HOLES… in the ground and getting spines stuck in his nose and mouth. It is quite a challenge getting them out of his tongue, and we even pulled one out that had gone all the way from outside his mouth through into the mouth. We have now been at a spot where there are no Cacti. Will be staying for awhile.

(HE just digs down into the dirt when we get home, rolls around in it, then lies down.)

The bikes have not worked out all that well with regards to Tucker either. He only has the stamina to go maybe 3-4 miles and then he is exhausted, but perhaps if we can keep him from running the 3-4 miles chasing rabbits, he might do better. We are thinking of getting a bike trailer to haul him home in.

Then to change the subject. 2018……

This first week of the year has been a very different time for me. It all started reading a post of a friend of my sons, asking how to change a persons Facebook page to memorial, as it is emotionally charging to get the birthday reminders of people who have died. (apparently it has to be the person who is in charge of the page)

Anyways it got me thinking about the people I have on Facebook who have died. My thoughts then went to Other people who had died and I had a sudden brainstorm, in that Facebook might be a place to find someone whom I thought had died, but had no idea how to find her.

Back about 40 years…….. I had a very good friend named Maxine. We were both nurses in Williams Lake and both single. WE did a lot of great road trips, many adventures together. Time went by, I went north and she went to Kamloops. We stayed in touch, in fact I remember her partner Don giving me a rough time because every paragraph in the letters I wrote started with “Well”

Well, Maxine was an incredible person. Just one of those people from my past that was truly wonderful. A great friend.

Then many years went by, I got married, went back to university, had kids, moved to Chilliwack and then to Oregon. WE DID LOSE TOUCH.

Then in January 2009, Ken and I were performing for a concert (up from Oregon) in Williams Lake at the recreation centre. After the concert a woman came up to me, saying that her name was Anne… and that we had worked as nurses together back in the late 70s in Williams Lake(I did remember her) , and she knew that I had been a friend of Maxine’s. She went on to say that Maxine had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer (Ovarian, I thought, turns out it was colon), and that she had been told to “get her affairs in order”. Anne said that she had moved up north to ?Smithers?.

It was a very brief meeting, with all that has to be done taking down after a concert, it was late. I had not thought to get contact information (which I forever regretted)

It was a very busy week in our lives, we were dropping our son off at university and had to be back to Oregon. Thoughts of finding Maxine were put off.

It was quite ironic because within a few very short weeks, I was given the diagnosis with advanced endometrial cancer (not terminal necessarily) so underwent very aggressive treatment Surgey, chemo, radiation and then more chemo, and then…. the waiting around bit.

So essentially a year later, when life was no longer all about me, I guess I thought perhaps that with the significant diagnosis, that Maxine has succumbed to the disease. I thought about her a lot, but really lacked the knowledge of how to find someone you wanted to find.

Over the years I have often tried to find out about what had happened, doing internet searches, searching through nursing sites….

I did not find out until January 1st 2018. … I decided to do a Facebook search and there she was. I had only started Facebook in 2008 and had never expected Maxine to be there, but there she was. Anne was a friend of hers on Facebook , so I contacted Anne to find out what all had happened and got the story. ( I guess I wondered what would happen if you sent a friend request to someone who had died, if it was just be a painful reminder to the person she was with.)

Anyways, sadly Maxine died December 20 2010. She apparently took the diagnosis and decided to try to do everything she could to beat it. She did many natural things, trying to live healthier. She apparently DID go through Chemo while up in Smithers, and from what I gather, we likely would have been doing it at the same time.

I am very sad that I found her so late, but still glad that I did find out about her.

I guess I wanted to share this story because I think we all have special people in our pasts. I was given a second chance to reconnect, but … I guess circumstances failed me….or I just did not try hard enough.

Don’t let those very special people get away from you…..

MUCH LOVE

Janet

Quartzsite

December 30, 2017December 30, 2017 ~ mymostrecentobsession ~ Leave a comment

Quartzsite is our short term destination. It is in Arizona, just a few miles from the California border. It is at the crossroads of highway 10 and HWY 95. The population is 3600 people and it is often the hottest place in the USA in the summer time.

The winter is when all the action takes place there though. The population at any one time in the winter is 250,000 and they get 1.5 million visitors a year.

The weather is one attraction, but there is no way a town that small can host that many people. The key is that there are hundreds of miles of flat BLM land surrounding Quartzite and the “boondocking” or dry camping capital of the US. As one guy at a solar place told us last year “the only place where someone spends 300,000 on a motor home to go camping for free in the desert.” We have been boon docking for 6 weeks now and are not sure we want to camp alongside that many people, after all part of the reason we do this is for the wide open spaces we get.

Back to the OTHER reason we are attracted to QuartzSite….ROCKS.

Now is not the greatest time to be in Quartzite, so we just spent part of a day there and then left, there are a few rock shops open now, but the shows begin in January. THIS IS VARIETIES of quartz… I think. HUGE.

During January, there are 3 major shows, that draw in sellers and buyers from all over the world. Rocks and things made with rocks … jewellery and apparently many very unusual things. We have not been in Quartzite in January, so will likely have much more to tell after we have been. That and likely LOTS of pictures. What we hope to do is to learn more about the rocks we find, how to recognize them and how to work with them. We have some lapidary equipment at home, and each rock is dealt with a little differently.

OH and I put this one in here for Tucker…. his goals are very different from ours. Imagine if HE was writing this blog. 🙂

So for now, we left Quartzite and found some great places to camp 30 miles north east, with the plans to rent a car for a month, and camp out of town and travel in with the car.

We are thinking seriously about getting a tow vehicle, but it will be much more complicated and expensive getting one here, so we thought we would just get the rental for this year and decide when we get home, what to do.

I thought I would include a cute little story about our christmas day dinner. Years ago when we first moved to Bandon Oregon, we had some friends over for supper and made something sort of fancy with Scallops. The recipe was from a cooking light magazine and it was delicious. I loved cooking light recipes and so over the years I collected the magazines and then the annual books. I had them all. Finally they became an online entity, and eventually I was just looking up my recipes online so gave away all the books.

Well it turns out that you can no longer GET recipes from 1997 online. So Ken and I set out to try to remember all that was in that recipe. It is always funny how things come to you in the middle of the night. One night after letting Tucker out during the night he came back and said “Asparagus”…… and then ” I think there was asparagus in that recipe”. So we gradually pieced together that there was also lemon rind… and juice…..etc.

So we made the dinner for boxing day, and took all the pictures like they do on recipe blogs. So here it is.

First you roll the scallops in corn starch, then heat up olive oil in pan, fry them for about 3 minutes on each side, then remove from pan.

Add 3/4 cup of white wine, then the lemon juice, rind, CHILI PUREE (we used 1/4 cup of our homemade tomato sauce) and asparagus. x about 5 minutes, then add the scallops to the dish. Heat x 1 minute or so.

then serve over rice.

my lousy selfie…… I still feel that there might have been something else in the dish, but it was still great. Now if only I could find a 1997 cooking light magazine.

Much love and Happy New YEAR

janet