Hiatus or Depression? You Decide.

When the rain gods close a door, they open a...well...

Can't fool me again! ...or something like that...

Whatever...

I'm depressed.

Every fossil excursion I've planned since May has been waylaid by heavy rain and rising water levels.

At first I was having serious digging withdrawals, then I took advantage of the opportunity to catch up on all the projects and housework that had been taking a back seat to my fossil needs.  

Now I'm caught up.

Now what?!

A year has passed since I last met up with Miss Vickie in Keokuk, Iowa

and we were both ready to do some rock hounding.

I once again combined a trip to visit family and friends in Missouri with a trip to hunt for geodes.

Vickie got a haircut outside our luxury accommodations.  All the better to stay cool when you're rockhounding in July.

It is easy to find geodes in this area. The main difficulty is breaking them open.  Last year I loaded up 5 gallon buckets of unbroken geodes only to find that when I finally opened them, the majority were duds.  Opening geodes on site saves bringing home duds but it's also hard work.  We didn't have the right chisels for the job.  After several hours of pounding, mine flattened out so that I was basically smashing the geodes open.  We'll remember that for next time.

The big advancement this year

was a handy "barge" to transport our finds along the creek.  Vickie's husband, Jim, constructed this for us and it was such a help.  He also sent 2 of his amazing custom Bloody Marys for me in Vickie's cooler.  

Joy!!!

Can you say "impetigo"?

Neither can I but, man, these creeks get gnarly in warm weather.

Add to that all the small patterned snakes swimming in the water around my feet and you've got a DEFCON 1 creep out factor.

So you may ask yourself, "Did they get out of the water?"

Nope.

Gotta find those rocks!

Doesn't this look like rock candy?  Yum!

I found plenty of geodes but not the variety of interior minerals that I found last year. 

This was different for me: a solid interior of a mineral that resembles mica. 

I wanted to bring home a biggun' this year, through the Vickie and Jim snowbird system: I send all my rocks to Wisconsin for the summer and they find their way to Florida in the fall.

This monster had been broken into several pieces and abandoned on the shore, probably because there is an unattractive mineral deposit over the crystals, but I couldn't help myself. I loaded up a few of the best chunks to work on at home.  The crystals have an interesting multifaceted shape. The biggest piece, in the photo above will come home in November.

There are fossils, too!

I found a few more bits of fossilized lithostrotionella coral.

Doesn't this stuff have a nickname?!

Vickie found this pretty crinoid stem so I knuckled down and managed to scrape together a few pieces for myself:

Some interesting shell fossils as well:

This year we planned to hunt for 2 half days and one full day,

but after one half day and one full day, we opted to eat meatloaf at a local diner and head our separate ways.  

Still...as I drove out of town I couldn't help thinking, 

"Maybe just a couple hours in the creek before I go."

I know you have wondered, from time to time, about the origins of the word "mollycoddle".

Here's your answer from the World Wide Words web site.

Mollycoddling

Q From Richard Buttrey, UK: Have you any idea where mollycoddlingoriginated?

A Let’s take it in its two parts. The second comes from the verb to coddle, meaning to treat somebody in an overprotective way, as though he or she were an invalid. The verb in this sense is not recorded before the early part of the nineteenth century — its first appearance is in Jane Austen’s Emma: “Be satisfied with doctoring and coddling yourself”. It looks very much as though it comes from an older sense of the verb meaning to boil gently, to parboil. That sense is linked to caudle, an old word for a warm drink of thin gruel mixed with sweetened and spiced wine or ale, which was given chiefly to sick people. Hence, by association of ideas, coddle took on its modern sense.

The first bit is on the face of it easy enough, since it is from the pet form of the given name Mary (as in Sweet Molly Malone of Dublin’s fair city). But Molly has also had a long history in several different but related senses associated with low living. (The name was popularised by Middleton and Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl of 1611, which featured a criminal called Moll Cut-purse.) As either molly or moll, from the early seventeenth century on it was often used to describe a prostitute, hence, much later, the American gangster’s moll. As molly it was also a common eighteenth-century name for a homosexual man, often in the form Miss Molly, and a molly house was a male brothel (as in Mark Ravenhill’s new play at the National Theatre in London, Mother Clap’s Molly House).

It’s sometimes said that the molly in mollycoddle comes from the sense of a prostitute, but the usage evidence shows that it was really linked to the gay associations. As a noun, it was used particularly of a man who had been over-protected in childhood and so considered to have been made into a milksop or effeminate. For example, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote in Pendennis in 1849: “You have been bred up as a molly-coddle, Pen, and spoilt by the women”. The verb came along later in the nineteenth century and was used more like the way we do now.