I seem to have managed to get myself elected an officer of this local bar association. Usually, as here, any club in which I am an officer is one which desperately seeks volunteers to fill empty slots. This week I had to confront my first official duty--the local catering room's earnest desire to increase the price of our bar association monthly meeting steaks. I am reminded why I did not go into event planning for a living. I hope that my term of office is only one year.
I must travel out of town to San Diego for business this weekend. I would much rather spend my weekend in Texas. The issue now is whether I must fly tonight or tomorrow. I hope I get a reprieve until tomorrow.
I got an e mail from my Arkansas nephew this morning. I am glad to see he is writing so well, as he's still not too old. I wish I could spend my weekend taking him fishing someplace, but it is not to be.
Lately I have a hankering to be back at one of my childhood haunts, The Crater of Diamonds State Park, in Murfreesboro, Arkansas. I'd walk the plowed field which used to be a volcano, searching for diamonds, finding quartz, calcite and amethyst, and in my mind's eye, I'd be very happy while I did so.
I think that my part of Texas needs more "pay to dig" rockhound sites. I don't like to look for rocks on other people's land, because I have this hangup that other people's property, well, belongs to other people.
Give me a place where I can pay three dollars and take home quartz from mine tailings and I am happy. Most of our best "searching" here is for ammonite fossils in the local limestoney ane shale-y strata, but I'd settle for any cool mineral. Ever since I got all these "Gemstones of x State" books at an estate sale a few months back, I have felt my inner rockhound bay at some diamond moon. It's funny, though, being a dilettante--I can't identify most minerals. I took a course in mineralogy in college, barely surviving with a "C", and learning perhaps as close to nothing about rock identification as imaginable. I wish I had had the discipline I acquired later when I was an undergraduate. Of course, I marvel that I went to college in the gorgeous Ozark Mountains and yet went hiking so few times. So maybe I have a cooler life now, where I live in flat near-prairie, but go hiking all the time.
I think sometimes about the boring nature of the familiar. I remember when we were in Victoria once, I looked up how to take a bus to a suburban neighborhood, where a walking trail began. The neighborhood was kinda nice tract home-y looking, and yet right by the houses a hiking trail into a gorgeous forest of tall trees began, ending in a provincial park by the ocean. We had a great time walking it, and it seemed very exotic. Yet I wondered if to the people who lived there and could hike it every day, it didn't seem a bit tame. It's so hard to appreciate the things one has all around one.
I must pack and eat raisin bran and read prognostications about sports and go to work.