Love on the Rocks

One sunny, breezy day Adrian and I hiked down from our campsite to our little private beach cove for a picnic lunch. I brought along a bead embroidery project that I've been working on for the Bead Journal Project. The piece is inspired by Lake Superior so it seemed fitting to work on it while I was sitting on the shore. The sun was hot and the waves were crashing as I sat there contentedly working on my bead project. Adrian, after a brief snooze in the sun, wandered along the shore hunting for the elusive Lake Superior Agate.
I had an idea that maybe I could incorporate a few small rocks from the beach into by bead work. So I called out to Adrian, much the same way that Princess Buttercup called out to Westley: "Farmboy, fetch me that pitcher". Except that I said: "Farmboy, look for a little flat piece of basalt that I could put in my bead work." Naturally Adrian replied: "As you wish". The fact that Adrian can quote from one of my all time favorite movies and also knows exactly what a flat little piece of basalt looks like makes me love him like crazy, but would you just take a look at what he found?
I know, it's so bloody perfect it makes you almost want to barf.I absolutely love geology. Call me crazy, but words like alluvial fan, paleomagnatism, migmatite and obsidian make me giddy. I think rocks are the coolest things and I'm always on the hunt for new ones to add to my haphazard collection. The truth is, I've been a rock picker since I was a grubby little kid searching for agates on the beach at Fogarty Creek in Oregon. I used to spend hours combing through piles of rocks and sand in search of treasures. As I've grown older, not much has changed except that instead of picking rocks with my sisters, I have Adrian to help me hunt for agates and other cool stones. We love finding a good beach to explore and on our trip up north we found a great one. In addition to many little agates, we found quartz, granite, rhyolite, basalt, chert, jasper, chalcedony, anorthsite, carnelian, thomsonite, amygdaloidal rhyolite, gabbro, diabase and lintonite. These are some of the prettiest ones that we found and I find them absolutely mesmerizing. I'll use a few of them in my bead project, and the rest I'll keep in a jar on the mantle over the fireplace so I can take them down and play with them when no one is looking.