Who's afraid of a little learning curve?

     Finally I synched my schedule with Bill, the president of the fossil club, and we met in Wauchula to look for fossils.
     There are a lot of things I'm not afraid of...

I'm not afraid to get dirty.

     I had to take this photo of myself after I got lost in a salt marsh north of Jacksonville, FL.  The getting lost part didn't scare me as I could see the highway and just had to wallow through some muck to reach dry land.  The only thing I truly feared that day was the embarassment of getting lost but amazingly, there were no witnesses.

I'm not afraid of the heavy work.

     I didn't say I liked it, I'm just not afraid of it.  This picture is my personal record for kayaks loaded on my poor old '95 Ford Ranger:  5!  That's alotta yaks!

I'm not afraid to get up at the ass-crack of dawn...

     As long as it's for something I'm interested in.  That's me in the knit cap, looking a little bleary.

Not really.

     I have a healthy respect but I don't foresee any problems.

     The thing that does make me anxious is the learning curve.  Everyone's got to start somewhere but I felt so lost, standing in the river with a shovel, trying to figure out how to find a fossil.  It's not as easy as it sounds.  Bill and his buddies would call out every one of their finds, "Horse tooth!  Tiger shark!  Small meg!" but I was conspicuously quiet.  

     How was it possible I wasn't finding anything?!

     Several hours later I was rewarded with a pretty little palate from a fish or ray (the bottom one in the photo.  The top palate came from Apollo Beach) and a few nice lemon shark teeth.

     Thank goodness for my makos and meg from Arcadia because I knew there was good stuff out there;  I just had to figure out how to find it.