Bartering

* * this post is also on my knitting blog * *

Today, I conducted a trade. Unschooling friend Heather has been bartering a toy bus for various items, always bigger and better. This will continue until she can barter for a real bus. That's right, her family would like to live on the road all the time!

Inspired by a cool Canadian named Kyle MacDonald, (did I ever mention here that Heather and I met Kyle's brother Scotty and his friend Fiddy?) she has worked her way from a toy bus to my set of hina dolls. They are usually set out only around Japan's Girls Day, but we have always had these dolls on display year round. They are just too cool to leave in a box most of the year. I thought I would like Heather's tent, so I decided to trade her. I really would love to see her family trade up to a bus. Hopefully a serious doll collector, nipponophile, a Japanese family, or any nice person out there will have something to trade, getting Heather closer to her bus/rv.

Click on the photo so you can see everything well. If you would like to trade with Heather for this set of dolls, visit her bartering blog. I wish her and husband Cliff the BEST in everything!

Meteorites

Long story today. Earlier this year, we visited the Halver Straight Mineral Collection and the Mark Bandy Mineral Collection at Drake University in the Harvey Ingham Building. Loved it. The kids didn't want to leave. The best part was having a teacher leave his lab class to come talk to us. I didn't get his name. He belonged to the Central Iowa Mineral Society, and had many cool things to show us. My kids were on fire for rocks when we left.

One cool thing that he showed us was a gallon bag of "black sand." He said that he had been collecting this sand by dragging a magnet across various beaches during the last five years. He said that the sand was meteorites, or space dust. At geology.com, it says that "Each day Earth is believed to gain over 1000 tons of mass from the infall of tiny meteorites. Most of these meteorites are the size of a dust particle or sand grain."

So today, I thought we would do a double whammy by geocaching and beach combing. Cool weather, strong breeze, great conditions. We didn't do very well with geocaching because of all leafy, signal-blocking tree cover. If the gps-r says that I'm 50' away, but has only 59' accuracy, then am I really gaining anything by using the gps-r? I wimped out and ditched. There were too many places the cache could have been. Like two hours worth of looking.

But we did score some black sand. Using strong magnets, the kids hopefully dragged their tools over the sand and found what looked like iron shavings. Remember the little cardboard toy where you make Pete have a beard by moving the iron shavings around with a magnet pen? It looks like what the kids found. They have a tiny corner in their sandwich bags filled with meteorites. Then a hard rain came down and we left.

We're still hoping to have a chunk of rock jump up out of the earth at us. The kids say they will continue collecting meteorites. I am sure they will. And they want their dad to see the mineral collections, so I am sure we will visit Ingham Hall again. It's free to visit the collections, and open to the public as long as school is in session and the building is open. When I asked for details, I got this email from Lawrence Staunton, chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department:

"The mineral collections are in the hallway of the top floor of Harvey Ingham Hall at Drake. They are open for viewing anytime the building is open, basically 8:00am till 5:30pm Monday through Friday. Harvey Ingham Hall is on the south side of Forest avenue, directly across the street from the western edge of the stadium. Park on Forest avenue."

Happy meteorite hunting, everyone!

What is a vug?

You have never heard of a vug? Come on, you see them all the time. We've visited very cool vugs at the Botanical Center. There are also scads of them around Rock Hound, GCX7D2, at Saylorville Lake. You probably call them geodes, but when we visited McBride Hall (at the University of Iowa) in the fall, we learned that the proper name for a rock with a crystal-filled cavity is a vug. A geode is a rock unto itself, a hollow, nodular rock, separate from substrate or matrix. Click on the photos, especially the lower one, to see the crystals closer. Pretty cool, eh?

Rock Hound is at a location that my children want to visit all the time. My younger son asks to go there. They enjoy seeing all the flotsam, looking for fossils like brachiopods (did you know that the root brac- means arms? Well, brachiopods evidently had "arms" to sweep food into their mouths.), eggs and animals, and vugs, and having unstructured play. We go to the access point, or trail head, in Prairie Flower campground and have some playground time, but something about the Rock Hound area is more desirable to the kids. And I am OK with that.

Poison ivy phobia

My nephew Tony spent the late afternoon in to evening time with us today. He doesn't get to geocache unless we're with him, so before we left the Saylorville Lake area, we went after cache. Make that, we attempted to go after a cache. Tony excitedly said, "Yeah!" when I said we could try to get one before we left for dinner.

We walked about 0.3 miles on a bike path, then had to turn off the path for less than 100 ft. We braved the tall grass. We ducked in to the understory. Our posture was like walking through caves or tunnels. Things then turned for the worse. Then my older son pointed and said, "Poison ivy!" and headed back to the bike path. Yes, he was correct. Poison ivy was everywhere. My youngest, who is extremely allergic to poison ivy, got scared, bolted from the front of the line to the pavement, saying, "I'm too sensitive! I have to leave." My oldest child was bored, so she went out to join them. My nephew and my younger son, who are age-mates, and I were left in the understory, facing a fence. The cache couldn't have been on the other side of the fence. We looked a little more, but left cache-less. This must have been a winter or very early spring kind of cache for us. My finding average and seeking frequency both took a turn for the lower. At least we got to see an oriole and two bluebirds, and an egg. We think the egg is a kildeer egg. Haven't looked in my identification book yet.

In more positive news, our CSA box is getting fuller all the time. On Sunday, I came home to find: 2 heads of pac choi, two heads of lettuce (Merlot and Speckled) as well as other loose leaves and edible pansies, turnips (Hakurei), four radishes, and two boxes of the most heavenly strawberries a person ever tasted. Driscoll's pales to these berries. I diced the turnips with zucchini and cauliflower, added garlic and basil, then steamed. Once they were done, I sprinkled with shredded cheese, let it melt, and YUM. Great with a turkey sandwich.

My garden also was overflowing when I returned from my Minnesota trip. I cut a lot of lettuce, gave some to a sister-in-law, and kept some for myself. Everything grew well in my absence, and I am sure it was due to Gabe's handy bunny fence. For a photo of the Mississippi River viewed from the banks in St. Paul on Saturday morning, click here.