FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Linda Smith]

Well, I will share a few photos of some of my self collected specimens.

[Gail]

I had asked Linda to join us, she is a delightful and enthusiastic mineral collector and loves to share her passion with others. Welcome Linda, great start!
Keep them coming, can't wait to see you add more.
What I love is that you can add as many photos as you like to just one posting.
Again, welcome!

[Linda Smith]

Thank you Gail for your warm welcome. So who am I? A little background. I have collected for over 50 years, so that makes me old as dirt. My interest in minerals led to a degree in Geology and I am an science educator. My collection is made up of both self collected and purchased specimens. I have been know to camp at mine dumps and and brake at road cuts. One of my favorite specimes is one that was a gift of sorts. While recovering from shoulder surgery, a fellow geologist and I were given permission to visit a gypsum open pit mine in Nevada. I was feeling sorry for myself as I couldn't wield a rock hammer. I spent my time collecting small hand samples of clear, fibrous aggregates of selenite. We hiked back up to our truck and I was admiring my friend's huge selenite specimen and started to kick the ground in frustration at being somewhat at a disadvantage, when I spotted this beautiful 29cm long swallow-tail twinned specimen.
Needless to say I went home happy.

[Linda Smith]

Some of my first minerals collected were copper minerals. Having relatives who worked the Ray Copper Mine in Arizona really helped. Some of my favorite specimens are copper specimens and this one is from the Sunnyside Area of the Ray Mine, ex Dave Waisman Collection.

[Jordi Fabre]

Hi Linda, welcome here!

Lovely Actinolite from an interesting provenance too...

Jordi

[Tracy]

Linda, welcome! Thanks for joining the women's group and for sharing your lovely specimens and great stories.

Happy Holidays!

- Tracy

[Linda St-Cyr]

Hello Linda and everyone else, too, since this is my first ever posting. Linda, you said you are a science educator. Perhaps we can correspond some because my goal for 2009 is to start a small science museum with inexpensive gadgets that I already have, and as many ideas as I can assemble. I also have the possibility of adding rocks to the mix, including an educational display of US minerals (which won a prize at the county fair) and educational displays of Arkansas and Nevada rocks. This invitation is open to everyone, of course - if you have ideas about science/mineral demos or even a clever way of explaining scientific phenomenon (did you know that traffic resembles supersonic flow?), I'd love to hear it. Now I must ask the administrators how to do that, since I was not able to attach my email to my signature - am I allowed to put it here? Apparently not, the preview function reprimanded me! But I know you want to keep the topics on minerals, so...?

Thank you, Linda, for posting your photos to share - they are very interesting and the story attached to the fish-tail selenite sure made me grin.

[Linda Smith]

Lnda, thank you for your response to my story. I teach earth science and mathematics at the high school level. Where I can help you I will. My first love is mineralogy and mineral collecting. I notice that you are in one of my favorite states, Nevada. I am in your great state often, so I might be fun to meet in person. I was at the NW Mining Association's meeting in Reno the beginning of this month.
While I am not a regular craigslist user, I had the opportunity to buy a small collection on this website. One of the specimens in the collection is this wulfenite. The collections was from the 1980's as all of the specimens were wrapped in newspaper from 1981. The locality is unknown but this is my first wulfenite and I am now on a quest to add more to my collectiion.

[Linda St-Cyr]

Wulfenites are addictive! That's my son's favorite mineral. I'm in Sparks, right next to Reno. ( I will have to modify my profile to show that.) It would be great to meet with you, and actually Tucson will probably be the soonest opportunity - I think I remember in the discussion about FMF people getting together in Tucson that you were one of those cheering that effort on. I'll be in room 234 at the Inn Suites, my first selling experience at Tucson since I just retired as a Boeing engineer and could never take that much time off before.

Math was my major until grad school when I figured out that I might need a more employable major, so I switched to fluid mechanics. Here's one of my favorite math riddles, from my high school calculus text (and somewhat applicable to people who like to envision crystal forms): describe a solid that looks like a circle, a square and a triangle when viewed from 3 different directions. :)

We're off now to imbibe food & spirits with mineral-collecting friends, if we can get through the cool white mineral coating the ground...

Happy holy days to all, and to all a good rock!

Linda

[Tracy]

Hi LInda -

That is a lovely wulfenite specimen. Thanks again for sharing your stories. For what it's worth, I considered going into teaching a few years back and those who know me well thought I'd make a good earth sciences teacher. In the end I stuck with my toxicology career but often wonder about a possible missed opportunity to do something truly fun and different.

Hope to meet you in Tucson or if you're ever in Northern NJ.

- Tracy

[Linda Smith]

One of my favorites is this Stibnite I acquired while in Beijing last October. While on tour, my husband and I were able to escape the watchful eye of our tour guide and meet with a mineral dealer there.

[Gail]

Tracy, turns out my new neighbor is an Earth Science teacher. She has two daughters who LOVE our minerals so we have taken to sharing some of our research minerals with them. We have agreed to host a field trip of her ten best students at our home, so that will be a great chance to work with children. We hosted a class from out of town once before and it was a very satisfying experience.
We make sure they groups are ten or less so they can all see what minerals we are discussing.

Linda, your stibnite is lovely. Very different from the Japanese Stibnites aren't they?

[Linda Smith]

Thank you Tracey and Gail. I am in the process of taking photos of my collection so little by little I will add to this forum.

Gail, I am really bummed as I will not get into Tucson until late Sunday so will miss your presentation at the Westward Look. I was really hoping to see your exhibit. Let me know privately if there is any way I can see you and it. I too would love to take some pictures of you and Jim and the collection for my scrapbook.

[bugrock]

Regarding Linda St-Cyr's math problem. Believe it or not I remember this as a problem in my high school geometry Book. Decades later trying to understand crystal structures, sphere packing etc for minerals is much more difficult. I love those diagrams in the mineral books followed by the statement: 'You may need a model to visualize this."!!!

Anyway the problem in the geometry book was to cut such a shape from a broom handle.
One can cut a cylinder of height equal to the diameter of the handle. Then looking at the cylinder from the side start at a diameter line in the top (one end) of the cylinder and make diagonal cuts to the lower outer edge of the cylinder on each side. The resulting solid will be circular as viewed from the top, triangular as viewed from one side and square when rotated 90 degrees and viewed again from the side. Would be best if this could be represented by a drawing. Is there any mineral with such a crystal shape?


George

[Gail]

Linda, I have long considered you a compatriot, so yes...you are welcome to come see our pieces. And you have a standing invitation to our home as well.
Happy New Year All !!!!

[Tracy]

George - I think I need a model to visualize your solution! :-) Off to find an old bloom handle...

Gail - just curious, what's your definition of a research mineral?

Please keep the photos coming Linda!

- Tracy

[Gail]

Tracy,


When we first got into collecting I went to the mineral auctions and often won pieces that I wanted to research to see if we wanted to add them to our collection. I would be curious about the write up of a piece, and found such things as galena, linarite, scheelite and hemimorphite to "research" and study up on as well as having a physical specimen in front of me. I would take a loupe and study them in detail. I would also spend time on mineral sites to see other examples.
The pieces we got from the auctions were pretty good, as a matter of fact, but most have been placed in drawers as we have collected finer specimens of those same minerals since.
I like to give these pieces to really deserving children who actually care enough to cherish them and not harm them. They come with labels also, so we really make it clear the labels need to always accompany the specimen. This is good training for youngsters also.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Linda, my apologies for taking up precious space on your mineral collection site. I will happily delete any non-Linda threads if you wish.

[Jordi Fabre]

Gail wrote:
>Linda, my apologies for taking up precious space on your mineral collection site. I will happily delete any non-Linda threads if you wish.

Linda and Gail: please don't delete them, if Linda is unhappy for the mix-up in her thread I can move the non-Linda threads to a different topic. Just letting me know, but please, don't delete them.

Jordi

[Linda Smith]

Jordi,
Please keep all of the items in this thread. We are a bonded group of women who enjoy sharing our information and experiences and I welcome this.

Gail, thanks for the info on how you researched your mineral acquisitions. You have given your collecting great thought and have informed yourself and that is really a wonderful example for those who wish to start collecting.

[Linda Smith]

Here is specimen that was part of the old collection I purchased. It was wrapped in a newspaper from 1981 and I particularly like the blue color with the galena.