Them's Fightin' Words!

The old guys told me

that I should find ways to use my fossils to support my fossiling habit.

Thus was born SolOpsArt, my online store at Etsy.com

I decided, as an experiment, to try "boosting" my SolOps page on FaceBook.  The page-boosting process involves all kinds of complicated "per click" costs, auctioned off daily, and blah-blah-I'm-confused kind of stuff but thankfully they offer a choice where they do all the heavy thinking for you.

Done!

So I set a low daily budget and sat back to watch the results.  Sales didn't go through the roof but they increased enough to cover the cost of the promotion plus a little extra.

I learned 2 things.

#1. Many men like shark tooth necklaces but have never heard of Etsy.

#2. Crazies will go after anyone.

In regards to #1, my New Year's resolution is finding a way to reach shark tooth lovin' dudes.

In regards to #2, DELETE THE CRAZIES!

Here's how it went: underneath a photo of several shark tooth necklaces, Crazy wrote,

 "I can imagine how many sharks SolOps killed to make these."  

I replied, cleverly I thought, "Father Time killed these sharks," wink wink nudge nudge.

Crazy wrote back, "Yeah, right SolOps," at which point I exercised my right to DELETE.

Sane people can see the teeth are fossilized but I don't want even a whiff of shark killing to taint my rainbow world at SolOpsArt.

There's always the river

A post-Christmas visit to the Peace River was just the thing to set my mind right.

Broken megs are better than no megs at all.

None of these huge shark teeth are perfect but it's a delight to be somewhere 

where I can find fossils like this.

Some nice tiger shark and hemi teeth.

Turtle shell segments, ray mouth parts, shell cast, sea urchin spine, gar fish scale, etc.

Cool little aspirin bottle.

One of the sweetest, chunkiest glyptodont scutes I've ever found.

Mike says it looks like an Oreo cookie so I Googled "rocks that look like food"...

Weird.

This rock looks like how I imagine a cooked kidney would look.

My most interesting find of the day was initially startling.

This fossil, nestled amidst all the dark river gravel, looked like 2 dog teeth in a bit of jaw bone. Fresh dog teeth.  Luckily, it is actually a split taper tooth with a very light color.  Here's the flip side:

My ex-sister-in-law (but always family) visited from Michigan.

She is a geologist and teaches at a university and came bearing gifts of minerals.

As I added her offerings of pink and orange gypsum to my collection of fossilized coral chunks, she said it was looking like a bower bird nest and we were some of the rare breed of ladies that appreciated a gift of a rock.  Well said!

And in case you've never seen photos of a bower bird nest, here's one of my favorites:

I wish I were so talented!