Pockets Full of Rocks

I've probably said this before, but it bears repeating... I love rocks.

From all reports, I always have loved rocks.  My mom tells a story about how my bus driver used to make me empty my pockets before she would let me on the bus, because I was always finding rocks at the bus stop and absconding with them.  

I have an old shoebox with all my favorite rocks from when I was a kid.  That sucker has traveled everywhere I've moved, much to several poor mover's laments I bet.  A lot of those have fossils, because where I grew up in Michigan was lousy with fossils and the landfill next to where I lived was constantly moving dirt, unearthing more of the treasures.

Now I'm here in the Ozarks where, I think, one of the ice ages stopped, dropping all the rocks it had pushed along the way.  Our property is covered in rocks.  

This, of course, makes digging for any reason a little difficult, but we deal with it.  There are also rocks pushing up through the lawn all the time, which makes mowing fun sometimes.  And gardening is always an interesting experience.  We pulled three wheelbarrows worth of rocks out of my front bed last month.

Nevertheless, I am in rockhound heaven here.  I wish I knew all the names for all the different kinds of rocks we have here.  All I know is one strikes my fancy for whatever reason, it goes in my pocket and comes into the house.  (Yes, I haven't changed in 45 years.)

I know I have petrified wood by the scads out there.  And quartzes of all sorts.  There's something called Mozarkite on the property.  I have a big one I'm currently using as a corner border for one of my gardens.  We also have a bunch of rocks with geodes in them, albeit not the huge fancy geodes - usually just a hole or a crack in the rock filled with tiny clear crystals.  

Yesterday, I found a rock that is super sparkly on its broken face.  The other parts are bland and uninspiring, but that one side is amazing.  It's sitting on my bathroom counter now where I left it after I washed it.  Every time I turn on the light, it makes me happy with it's sparkliness.  

I also found a rock in the roots of an overturned tree the other day that I finally brought inside and washed yesterday.  I'm not sure how to describe it.  It's like someone took a geode and flattened it out so the whole length of it is covered in sparkly bumps.  I really should take pictures, but photos never turn out the way I see the rocks.  Trust me, they're pretty amazing.  

One of my bookshelves has an assortment of rocks with a circular pattern in them.  (Lined up in front of the books... come on, I can't spare a whole shelf for just rocks.)  Another has various pretty smaller rocks I've found.  I have a crystal dish with all my super special rocks in it.  There's a chunk of smoky quartz I found on the TV stand.  There's a cool swirly patterned rock I'm using as a bookend in the spare room.  

Pretty soon, Hubs is going to start telling me to empty my pockets before I come in the house.  ;o)

I joke.  He's amazingly patient with me and my rocks.  He enjoys looking at them when I show them off, so that's a plus.  I'm forever going 'hey, look at this one' when we're out on the property.  More often than not, I show him a rock and then let it fall back to the ground.  But when they're really special, they go into my pocket.

Maybe someday I'll hit a geology show and find out if any of these super special rocks are worth something to anyone but me.  I could be sitting on a financial windfall.  LOL, or not.

What about you?  Are you a rockhound?  Or do you think I'm a little cuckoo?

Space for Books

I don't know about all y'all, but I am running out of space for books.  Okay, so I cleared off an entire shelf  of reference books for Kira's shrine, but that's beside the point.  (Those got moved to the now mostly-full bookcase next to it.  I think there's room on that entire case now for maybe two-three more books.) 

Even if you ignore the non-fiction cases entirely, I'm close to being full just about everywhere else.  The SF/F case - one of which is already full of books stacked horizontally instead of vertically - has room for maybe ten more paperbacks.   Same for the suspense/thriller/mystery case.  The literature case might take another fifteen.  Less if they're meaty novels.  

It didn't help that yesterday I hit the thrift store and came home with ten more books - most of them Westerns.  I didn't even have a spot allotted for Westerns.  The few I had were stuck in with the literature.  They're all moved into the spare room now, on top of the shelf with my own proof copies, my Phyllis Whitney collection, and books by friends of mine.  

I could glean down again.  I mean, do I really need that many dictionaries and thesauruses - especially when I use the internet for that stuff now?  Are we ever going to use those old textbooks again?  Is there really a reason to keep The Writer's Market from 2005?  I mean other than nostalgia?  (Notice I'm talking about gleaning NF and not fiction here. I've already culled out most of the fiction I wasn't planning on keeping.)

Hubs, being the great and wonderful man he is, suggested that maybe it was time to get some more bookshelves.  Except neither of us know where we would put them. The office is out of wall space.  I could, I suppose, moved some things around and stick a shelf or two more in the spare room.  And there's one more spot in the living room for a shelf.  

Ooo, the book on food remedies can go on the kitchen shelf with the cookbooks.  There's one new spot available!

Yes, it's a sickness.  No, I don't want a cure.  What I want is more space for books.

What about you?  Do you have loads of hardcopy books?  Or are you like my mom and get books from the library instead of keeping books of your own?

Updated 7:05am:  After I wrote this post, I spent some time shuffling things around and I have room again.  Of course, now the one non-fiction case is totally full and the other now has three out of five shelves with literature on them.  One is reserved for Kira and the last shelf is a mix of NF and F by the same author with a few other NF's to fill the remaining space.  And now there are books on top of the dresser in the spare room.  LOL.  On a bright note, Agatha Christie now has her own shelf.  She's gonna need it.

Collecting Books

Okay, so I watch game shows on occasion and one of my favorites is America Says.  It's a show where the contestants have to guess how America would fill in the blanks to a variety of statements.  Recently, I watched one where the question was something like 'The first things I collected were ______.'  And they give seven blanks for the top seven answers.  I don't remember them all, but they were like stamps, rocks, stuffed animals, etc.

Books was not one of the top seven answers.  =o\

I've been collecting books since I was old enough to hoard anything.  I had a whole slew of these tiny fat paperbacks (not sure where those went... must ask Mom) and a collection of Sweet Pickle books (I sold those).  In my teens, I started gathering old books by classic authors.  Whenever I had a little extra money and I was in a place where there were old books, I'd pick up what I could. 

My father was a great one for flea markets and even when I wasn't with him, if he saw an old book at a reasonable price, he'd buy it for me.  I still have most of those - including a few by authors I've never heard of or authors I have heard of but this was an unheard of title.  Dad wasn't picky about the books he bought for me.  If it was old and inexpensive, he bought it.

In college, I would haunt the used book store in town.  I snagged a lot of great finds in there, hiding in the bins no one wanted, where they were either free or 25c.  I found a brilliant - if poor quality - near first edition of The Fountainhead in there with the original owner's name and military information written in the front cover.  He was in a bomber group over the Pacific.  That one is my favorite, I think.

Anyway...  These days it's really hard to find those kinds of books for cheap.  In the age of the internet, anyone can go online and find out what a book is 'worth' and mark it up accordingly.  I haven't found a really impressive hardcover in years.  Nothing like my Tennyson from the 1800s anyway.  (The book that shall never be opened because it's disintegrating.)  Or the leather bound softcover of The Complete Works of Shakespeare from the 1930s who pages are so thin and soft and silky.  Or the late 19th century copy of The Rubyiat of Omar Khayyam.

These days, I collect old crime novels.  I can still find those at thrift stores and usually don't have to pay more than 50c a piece.  I'm working on Mickey Spillane, but really any old crime novel will work - MacLean, MacDonald, Pendleton, Ellery Queen, Sax Rohmer when I can find him, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, etc.  I'm in the process of acquiring all the Agatha Christie novels, in as old an edition as I can find.  And I recently discovered Helen MacInnes, so I'm snapping her up, too. 

I also collect Phyllis Whitney novels.  Again.  I had a collection of her that I started when I was a teenager, but during one of my many moves, I let her go for some stupid and unremembered reason.  I'm rectifying that. 

And I collect Vince Flynn novels.  I only have three of his original works left to acquire.  (I'm eschewing the ones written after his death which he had no part in other than they're about his character and the publisher is slapping his name on them - above the smaller name of the guy who actually wrote the books.)

Oh, yeah, and I also do collect SF.  I have a collection of Andre Norton paperbacks I bought as a box lot. I'm working on Bradbury and Heinlein, but SF is harder to find around here.  I used to have a lot more, but when I was packing to move to MO, one box got unintentionally donated to somebody somewhere.  =o(  Lucky I managed to move another box that had a couple rare, old SF novels in it.

Anyway, I totally geek out about my books, as you can probably tell from reading this far.

I have paper printouts of certain of these authors' books, so I can check off what I have and what I've read of them.  This is one of the rare times I wish I had a smartphone, so I could carry the lists with me.  I can't tell you how many times I've bought books and discovered I already had them.  In those cases, I keep the better copy (or older, rarer copy) and cycle the other one back into the thrift store system.  I win, St. Vinny's wins.  It's all good.  If it's really a special book, I'll keep both copies. 

So, you can see why I talked about needing more shelves. 

What about you?  Do you collect books?  Do you collect anything?  What would be on your top seven collectables list?

For the record, I'm not sure if any of the books I collect are really worth anything to anyone but me.  But that's not the point.  At least it's not for me.  Maybe the Kid will find out if they're worth anything when she inherits them all someday.  Hell, maybe by then, they really will be worth something.  LOL