Bedrock Bob

We think alike! I figure the powdered ceramic would make an excellent floor. Like terrazzo. Instead of washing dishes you could pour big floor tiles with white portland. Instead of drying dishes you could grind a nice surface on it. You would never have to wash dishes and you could spend that time doing something worthwhile. After a year you would have a fantastic patio to show for it instead of wrinkled fingers. It is a perfect win/win situation! --- The Plaza Cafe in Santa Fe has been there for 80 years. I used to coffee there. They took all their broken dishes and cups and tiled the walls. They used them for borders and designs in the floors. The bathrooms were completely covered in broken dishes, cups and saucers. The cup handles stuck out all over the walls at every angle. There must have been a 12 yard dump truck load of broken dishes stuck to the walls. Every color, pattern and texture that you could ever imagine. It was way beyond cool.

I used that method for about a week but I got tired of eating off a dirty plate after about six days. So I threw that plate up on the countertop and went down and bought me a years worth of dishes. I have considered installing a chute next to the sink that leads outside to small crusher. The idea of just pushing all those dirty dishes into a hopper and powdering them has always fascinated me.

My son uses a French Press. The coffee is excellent. But you have to wash that thing. I only wash dishes once a year so I would have to buy a half dozen. I would not have room for all those dirty coffee presses on my countertop with all the dirty cups and dishes. It would force me to remodel the kitchen and make it bigger or start burying my dirty dishes in the yard. I use the Mexican Press. After my little funnel has dripped I roll up the grounds in the filter and squeeze the heck out of it getting the last of that thick, oily, alkaloid rich coffee into the cup. I use the small drip filter instead of the paper cones because the cones have a crappy seam that opens up when you squeeze them.

When you said "Folgers freeze dried" I suddenly remembered that I used "Folgers Crystals" for about a year. One of my buddies got me started drinking it. I remember really liking that stuff and it was quick and easy. I recall it made some killer red eye gravy too. I might just go out and get me a little jar of it. I don't think I will change my morning routine to instant but I might make some more of that red eye gravy to go with the venison. My mom used to drink instant. She would not let me drink coffee but the whole house would smell like dad's cowboy coffee and mom's instant crystals in the morning. I liked to lick my finger and stick it in those crystals. And I liked the way the instant stained the spoon. I would clean that off too. Those Folgers Crystals were probably the gateway drug that led to my raging caffeine addiction today. Kinda like low grade brown meth.

Yes I agree. Sometimes hard things are brittle and sometimes softer things are more durable. I suppose what I was trying to say is it is both tough and hard. It is very hard because it resists abrasion with good quality silicon carbide paper. It is very tough because you can set it on an anvil and whack it pretty good and it will just reject the hammer blow. So it is high on the whackability scale too. I would say about a 734 or 735. It is a whackabilly for sure. It was very difficult to get a window big enough to see the inside so I was trying to knock one of those horns off with a hammer. I wasn't hitting it to see how hard it was I was hitting it to get a look at a broken face. In doing that I realized it was extremely durable as well. Me am not going to do a specific gravity test on it. It is not exceptionally heavy for its size and color. In the hand it feels about right for a piece of iron rich rock. Me would estimate the SG to be about 4.5-5 but that is a wild azz guess just like the hardness estimate and the whackability scale. It is hard. It is durable. It is aphanitic or cryptocrystalline. It is not particularly heavy for an iron rich volcanic but heavier than quartz. From the little me was able to grind off of it, it has a light streak. It is of extrusive or very low pressure volcanic origins. It is only very slightly attracted to a neo magnet. It is found as nodules scattered within a white, chalky horizon below a flow of high silica vesicular basalt several feet thick. Me have been back to that spot repeatedly over the last ten years and me just can't find the ledge that these things are rolling out of. Most natives would have given up. But me is headed back out to get another bite of that big volcanic trap and see if me can locate that spot and collect a few more. Me am not going to give up until me finds them again. Me is very curious.

It could be. It is as hard as heck but my hardness estimate is just a wild guess. It took forever to grind a very small window about the size of a pinhead on one of those small protrusions. I might be overestimating the hardness. Let's just say it is mighty durable stuff. When I realized how hard it was I hit it with a ball peen hammer and the hammer just bounced. It did not even phase the little nodule at all even though it sat on points on the anvil. So it is really tough. Hopefully I will find the spot and have a bunch more nodules to play with soon. The bizarre shapes and lines are what has me riveted. I have some diamond carvers for the flex shaft tool and I will be able to whittle more away and experiment more. Thanks for the input. You might be right. I have seen tough basanite rinds on some stones as well as basanite that was porous like scoria. I suppose it makes sense that it would form hard, wild shaped nodules too.

Here is a little stone that has always been a mystery. Non magnetic, very hard (8.5-9 by estimate). I polished a corner into a little window and it was nearly impossible to cut it with silicon carbide paper. Streak was white or clear. Maybe a little metallic but it was difficult to remove any material. The window was just smooth, black, almost sub metallic and glassy. Like a cross between iron and obsidian. Found as nodules in a volcanic field in southern New Mexico. There is a white ash/mud sill under a volcanic extrusive flow that has these little strange shaped nodules eroding out of it. Some are as big as your head down to about the size of the end of your thumb. All of them peaked, sectioned and often dotted in the center of the sections with little imperfections. I am guessing it is an iron/silica combination of some sort. Maybe alloyed with something. The peaks and lines and dots are awesome. I can't say I have ever seen stones like it. There are lots of shapes of iron nodules in these parts but nothing quite as odd as these. I am thinking they are special in some way. I found these rocks several years ago and have attempted to re-locate them on three occasions. So far no luck. I am headed out again in a day or two and see if I can find that spot again. What the heck do you think they are?

The little bags would work everywhere. I like that idea. That is why I like the funnel and the filters. It works on the stove top, on the camp stove and on the campfire too. All you gotta do is heat some water somehow and the coffee is the same every time no matter where you are waking up.

It is a good morning for coffee. How do you make yours? Back in the open range days the cattle gangs would make "cowboy coffee". All it took was a can and a piece of bailing wire to get perfect coffee. The CCC guys and the rail gangs continued the tradition through the depression. Old construction or mining guys have probably seen it back when they were young. Hardly anyone does it that way anymore. I still don't think there is a better way to do it. I used to boil coffee in a pot with a bail and take the pot outside each morning and spin it just like they did back in the day. I stopped when those little funnels came out. How do you make your joe, Joe?

I have always heard those stories. I have never seen it anywhere except in a greenhouse in Taos. I know it exists in south Texas but I have never seen any first hand. Nor have I ever seen any for sale. I know people who have access to it within "the church" but I have never experienced it. My feelings are that any peyote found growing in the wild should be left there. A person would have no reason to cut it. It is just darn near extinct in the wild. And as you point out it was always a rarity. If a fellow wants to have that experience it is easy. Let the San Pedro do the work and leave the peyote alone. Besides, if you get caught with a peyote button you will be arrested, given a forced injection while chained to a table, sleep on a mat in a filthy steel dog bed and then have to spend $1000 getting unscrewed. Talk about a bad side effect! San Pedro is completely legal to grow and you see it everywhere. No problems. Dry whiskey is good medicine. It is a whole lot closer to going to church than going to a party IMHO. And just to make sure to stay on topic, the Lophophora Williamsii cactus is not on the New Mexico protected cactus list at all. So if I did find some out there I could legally make a bug out of it and sell to the touristas.

You have really worked yourself up into a lather over me haven't you Slim? At your request. For your case files... I just found these a couple days ago. I have not dated them yet but I know they both are Corning glass, machine made and probably made prior to 1950. I found them while shooting glass bottles with my S&W .44 mag revolver. I went out to disfigure some cactus and litter the area. I wound up committing the unholy atrocity of picking up these bottles while I was at it. I could only take these small ones though because my pickup was just too full of disfigured cactus. The one on the left is a standard medicine bottle and probably held some sort of small pill. The one on the right is a perfume bottle. Have you ever found any interesting bottles Slim? Have you taken a look at the nifty antique bottle website hosted by the BLM? There is a link to it in that last post of yours I hijacked. Here it is again. https://sha.org/bottle/ It is a treasure trove of information and a great tool to date antique bottles. You could learn a whole lot about bottles by taking the time to read some of that info! Or you can spend your time dampening a panty over what I am doing. Either way it is all good! See ya Slim!

I sure do!

I use cactus in my art so it stands to reason I would photograph blooming cactus in the areas I hunt. And since I hunt placer fields, strewn fields and mineralized areas most of these photos came from those places. Imagine that! Do you take photographs of the cactus in the areas you hunt? Do you hunt? Here is a photo of some sweet sotol that I took on a trip to the Sierra Caballo. (a rich placer field by the way Slim!) It was on the last evening of my dig and the sun was going down. A prime example of a protected New Mexico "cactus". These are the things I like to share. Compare and contrast this with what motivates you to post Slim. I am sure everyone who is reading this is. As long as you go on with this attitude you will keep looking like an unhappy crank with nothing better to do than get pissy over my posts. And since I live my life outdoors doing cool things and making cool things I have an endless supply of neat photos and stories. Not a bunch of jealous beta whine that you are offering up. I still have the words to that exorcism I did on you years ago. I can chase those demons out of you by simply doing it again. I will let you pay it off a little at a time and not even charge any interest. Think about it Slim. It is a helluva deal. Happiness is precious and you obviously ain't got some of that.

Those don't grow in New Mexico. At least not in the wild. It is much too cold and way too high in altitude. And those in the photo are not wild. They are being grown on a San Pedro rootstock. Peyote does not grow like that naturally. There is no "commercial" market for peyote but it is available for consumption. It grows much too slow to be harvested and has been almost completely wiped out in the very small area it grows in the US. There are rare exceptions but they are extremely rare. You can find several meteorites before you will find peyote in the wild. All peyote is cultured. Growers graft tiny peyote sprouts (from seed) to the tricocereus (San Pedro) cactus which is the cousin to peyote. It has a hearty root system where peyote only has a few tiny hairs for roots. It makes the peyote grow exponentially faster. You have shown us an example of that in your photo. Virtually every peyote button consumed in the US in several decades has been harvested from a graft grown on a San Pedro cactus. San Pedro cactus are very common but not native. They are Peruvian cactus. They are very high in mescaline as well. There is a lady in Taos that is said to be the chingona of Peyoteras. She has a huge greenhouse filled with San Pedro cactus over ten feet high. Every arm is bursting with peyote buttons. She grows it legally for the Native American church. If you are looking at a peyote button there is a 99% chance she grew it. I would bet a dollar that photo is from her nursery. If not it is from one of her friends nurseries. If peyote is used as a "sacrament" as it is intended it is legal. Just like ayahuasca and hoasca borealis. San Pedro is the original sacred cactus and is much more widely used than peyote but peyote got all the press. San Pedro is the sole source of mescaline as peyote is very rare and is tightly controlled within the circles it is grown and consumed in. Only through Peyoteros in Mexico and maybe one in Texas can wild peyote be obtained for any amount of money. Peyote is just like gold nuggets or meteorites. Maybe even rarer. It has to be one of the most precious finds a guy could ever make. Fun fact - San Pedro is a common landscape plant in southern Arizona. There is a famous median in Phoenix that is covered with tricocereus bridgesii, a very potent species of San Pedro. Most of the powdered mescaline ever produced came from cuttings taken from that highway median. Here are a few San Pedro cactus blooming on my front porch. The tops are just over 6 feet from the deck. They are a night blooming cactus. This is the night they opened.

"Bull quartz" is massive, clear quartz formations. It generally is devoid of mineral and is mined for flux. The quartz in the specimen is not bull quartz. It is milk quartz. Most gold is found in hematite gossan. Quartz is certainly a component of that and gold may be sticking to the quartz within the gossan but it is the iron component and not the quartz that is important for gold. In answer to your question free gold is most likely found in dark red, oxidized hematite gossan within a few feet of the surface and down to water table. The quartz in this gossan can be any color but mostly milky or rust stained from the iron in the vein. Oxidation is generally the rule. You see the quartz associated with gold only because it is the most durable material in the vein and sticks around long after the iron is gone. When looking at a gold vein the oxidized iron is what you see and not so much the quartz in most cases.