Lapidary Weekend has come and gone.
And as always, I loved it. - For those who don't know, Lapidary weekend is an OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) family camp where families dig thunder eggs at Richardson's Rock Ranch and learn to cut cabochons in camp - Hancock Field Station, outside of Fossil, Oregon.
The first day, my father and I headed out at around 7:30 or so - a bit later than he had wanted, and he was mildly concerned that the campers would already have come and gone out to the beds by the time we got there. This has happened before, but only on very rare occasions. We were a little late, but the campers were later, so we got to spend plenty of time looking around - not that we actually need any more rocks, but when has that stopped us?
The temperature was unusually cool and pleasant - the high desert in early September is usually very hot - so I didn't sweat the buckets I normally do.
First we went to the Blue Bed - thunder egg beds are pits in the ground, beneath a layer of some highly silicate material such as pearlite (as it is at Richardson's) - and no, the beds were not named for the color of the material they produced. The moss, opal and flat egg beds are the only ones that have descriptive names. I did my standard activity, that being walking around with a broom and a rock hammer, trying to show people likely places to dig, and assisting them to do so. I was rather disappointed with the blue bed, because so many of the thunder eggs we were finding were mostly hollow, as we discovered when we had pried them out. Some people really like that sort of egg, but I do not. I only broke out the lightest of the heavier equipment we bring at the end of our time there, and that was to hurry up and get out an egg that someone had been working on for a while. We proceeded to the red bed, which was more promising, but we had to cut our time out there short, as my father noticed a storm heading our way. It's a good thing that we all left when we did, since it started to rain when we were mostly to the ranch office.
As always, I spent some time at the high-speed sanders that night and the next day (though my father goes out with the second wave of diggers), and had my disappointment largely confirmed in that a large percentage of the eggs that got cut were of very little interest to me. The second group had better luck, spent more time in the red bed, and took out the heavy equipment (still hand tools - no motorized machines). One usually finds the best eggs in the floor of the bed, which means that they are much harder to get to.
Things were strange, though - an extra room had been built on the old lapidary shop, and that is where they put both the saws and the sanders. This was not a good thing - the people running the saws had a hard time hearing them, a lot of eggs went missing from people's buckets (they were no longer directly in sight), and you simply do not put high-speed sanders inside. Silicosis is the term I believed my father used - a condition where a high concentration of very fine particles of silica (as one finds in agate) is in a room where people are working, and because of the inclosed space, a lot of silica particles that would normally drift away (diffusion) get stuck in people's lungs, in response to which the body proceeds to poison itself by emzymaticaly attacking particles that are immune to said enzymes, though lung tissue is not. They set up a fan, which was a reasonable band-aid for the problem, but not enough. In the future they will either have to install vacuums at each sander, or move them outside again.
I now have a kitty cat fighting for space in my lap with the computer, and winning. Lapidary weekend was great, and now I'm home.
The first day, my father and I headed out at around 7:30 or so - a bit later than he had wanted, and he was mildly concerned that the campers would already have come and gone out to the beds by the time we got there. This has happened before, but only on very rare occasions. We were a little late, but the campers were later, so we got to spend plenty of time looking around - not that we actually need any more rocks, but when has that stopped us?
The temperature was unusually cool and pleasant - the high desert in early September is usually very hot - so I didn't sweat the buckets I normally do.
First we went to the Blue Bed - thunder egg beds are pits in the ground, beneath a layer of some highly silicate material such as pearlite (as it is at Richardson's) - and no, the beds were not named for the color of the material they produced. The moss, opal and flat egg beds are the only ones that have descriptive names. I did my standard activity, that being walking around with a broom and a rock hammer, trying to show people likely places to dig, and assisting them to do so. I was rather disappointed with the blue bed, because so many of the thunder eggs we were finding were mostly hollow, as we discovered when we had pried them out. Some people really like that sort of egg, but I do not. I only broke out the lightest of the heavier equipment we bring at the end of our time there, and that was to hurry up and get out an egg that someone had been working on for a while. We proceeded to the red bed, which was more promising, but we had to cut our time out there short, as my father noticed a storm heading our way. It's a good thing that we all left when we did, since it started to rain when we were mostly to the ranch office.
As always, I spent some time at the high-speed sanders that night and the next day (though my father goes out with the second wave of diggers), and had my disappointment largely confirmed in that a large percentage of the eggs that got cut were of very little interest to me. The second group had better luck, spent more time in the red bed, and took out the heavy equipment (still hand tools - no motorized machines). One usually finds the best eggs in the floor of the bed, which means that they are much harder to get to.
Things were strange, though - an extra room had been built on the old lapidary shop, and that is where they put both the saws and the sanders. This was not a good thing - the people running the saws had a hard time hearing them, a lot of eggs went missing from people's buckets (they were no longer directly in sight), and you simply do not put high-speed sanders inside. Silicosis is the term I believed my father used - a condition where a high concentration of very fine particles of silica (as one finds in agate) is in a room where people are working, and because of the inclosed space, a lot of silica particles that would normally drift away (diffusion) get stuck in people's lungs, in response to which the body proceeds to poison itself by emzymaticaly attacking particles that are immune to said enzymes, though lung tissue is not. They set up a fan, which was a reasonable band-aid for the problem, but not enough. In the future they will either have to install vacuums at each sander, or move them outside again.
I now have a kitty cat fighting for space in my lap with the computer, and winning. Lapidary weekend was great, and now I'm home.