![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There's pumas in the cravices!
So today I whacked the alarm clock at the utterly ungodly hour of 6:00 in order to get online in hopes that I could sleep in a few more hours because the rain had caused a postponement of the petrology field trip, which we had all of three days warning about; I guess if you missed Thursday's lecture you were just schist out of luck. (And no, that was not a bad geology pun; that was a geological euphemism for a rude word. There is a difference. Anyway, gimme a break, I was up at six am on a Sunday.)
So I staggered out of bed and halfway across campus to meet the others and got there just before they left. The trip started up at Port Deposit, where the Susquehanna River meets the Chesapeake Bay, and followed the fall line on back to College Park. At Port Deposit, we clambered up an old tonalite quarry. No, wait, not tonalite, granodiorite. Or was it tonalite after all? (Actually it all looked like gneiss to me.) It was one of those places known only to geologists, people who like guns too much, and people who need a dumping place for old equipment (like rusty iron things the exactly the size and shape of an Apollo landing capsule, or entire tractor-trailers being slowly buried in greenery, or a set of very damp textbooks, including log/trig tables and Basic Physics.) It was very damp and slimy and green and full of artifacts. Some of the rocks actually had a coating of blue lead minerals from the decay of old cartridges, how cool is *that*? And somebody had been using old Earthlink CDs as skeet, which was very amusing. I found myself wondering if maybe I shouldn't go into archeology too, because the human traces were so much more interesting than the rocks. I did get to see allanite, though. How exciting.
The next stop was at the Hunt Valley Mall, to admire the Sutter Schist and Cockeysville Marble. (Apparently the other van was having a party in between stops, complete with Muppets mix CDs, but our van just alternately studied and slept. I can't say I was disappointed.) Did you know that the first few dozen feet of the Washington Monument were built with stone from the Cockeysville Marble? I do now. Only it wasn't *that* Cockeysville Marble, it was part of the Cockeysville Marble back closer to where the type specimen is, because the Washington Monument isn't striped glittery black and red with biotite (although wouldn't it be cool if it was?) The Sutter Schist is a very mica-y mica schist that looks like it's covered with pimples, because it's chock full of garnets. And supposedly other stuff, including kyanite. The professors got way too excited about the kyanite. And the banging on things with hammers. I pulled out my pocket knife to demonstrate that yes, the hardness of kyanite does vary depending on which direction you scratch in-- that was the second of four times I magically pulled something out of my field bag that somebody was asking for. Not counting the Trusty Water Bottle, either. And by the time we were at Hunt Valley, crawling about between the two levels of rock cuts (full of trace fossils of upper Cenozoic steel-toothed rock borer worms), the sun was coming in and out and the temperature was varying by the minute between chilly and broiling. I finished the first refill of the bottle of water there.
We stopped for lunch in Liberty, at the Twin Kiss Drive-In. This is something I love about the geology department; every time we go on a field trip, we stop at some little random family-owned local place, because all the professors are the sort who just sort of idly boycott Big Business as a matter of course, and assume everybody else also prefers Twin Kiss or Barbara Frietchie's to McDonald's or Cracker Barrel. This has never been the case on any other group trips, where the tendency is to wimp out and go with the easiest common denominator. (This makes me think I *am* in the right place, maybe. Of course it has nothing to do with rocks, just me having mad crushes on *all* the geology profs, but hey.) Twin Kiss had about fifteen different kinds of frozen dessert drinks, but I just got their homemade root beer. It was definitely homemade root beer; it had that sort of grassy gamy aftertaste that's shared by good root beer and birch beer and sarsparilla, and also horehound candy and teaberry gum (and sometimes even really strong maple stuff) that tastes like trees. It's not exactly entirely pleasant, but it cuts through the boring sweetness that's all you get in the national brands, and it wasn't strong enough to be off-putting in this one.
Right after lunch we went up to Mineral Hill, which was at the end of a long trail which was uphill both ways. Did I mention that I'm almost comically out of shape? It was incredibly pretty, with the sun shifting in and out and the spring flowers out and the dogwoods blooming overhead and everything still sort of damp, the trail covered with pine needles and Liberty Reservoir glinting off through the trees and ferns uncurling themselves. However - gah - I made it up without embarassing myself, and I wasn't the last one to make it, but just barely, and if I hadn't had the Trusty Water Bottle refilled at lunch I don't know what I would have done.
Mineral Hill, it turns out, is a pile of rubble at the top of a hill, that has a lot of large pieces of sulphide and other interesting minerals. It was much more reminiscent of trying to snatch shark's teeth out of the waves, actually, because you waited until the sun came out from behind the clouds, scanned for anything shiny, and then had to grab it quick before the sun went away again and you lost it. I found lots of bits of malachite and talc and magnetite and biotite, so after the Revolution, if we find ourselves in sudden need of green paint pigment, or baby powder, or cores for electromagnets, or, you know, *body glitter*, my l33t rockfinding skills will save the day. (... surely somebody's written a post-apocalypse fic in *some* fandom featuring the trials of having to ration body glitter... Somebody? Linkage?)
The last stop was more granodiorite at a roadcut in Ellicott City. The last stop is always a roadcut by some busy street near a convienience store where we can't hear anything for the cars and don't really care anyway at that point because we're all dreaming of home and rest. The granodiorite was supposed to be really cool because it had epidote and titanite and sphene, which supposedly almost never occur in igneous rocks, but you couldn't prove it by me. This particular roadcut was also near a trendy little coffee shop called the Old Mill, and everybody else was crowding in to get drinks, and I was still thirsty and there was no tap or convenient broken aquifer from which to refill the Trusty Bottle, so I caved and bought something too. In this case it was an "Italian Soda", which seemed to be an excuse to charge a buck fifty for twelve ounces of tonic water with flavor syrup in it. Wait, isn't that a just plain *soda*, the kind you get at a good old-fashioned *American* soda fountain? *sigh*. Oh well, the regional soft drinks thing is a tradition and a hobby and a notable eccentricity of mine, and in some parts of Maryland, "overpriced at a trendy coffee shop" *is* what you get for a regional soft drink. They were also selling knickknacks and coffee beans and tea. I debated also buying Mom some tea for Mother's Day, just to see the look on her face, but she *really* doesn't need any more fancy teas, right Mom? heh.
And then it was home, and trudging back across campus, and I found an offering of home-made bread and pasta left at my doorstep. Is this a May Day thing? Perhaps I should leave it there for the dormitory fairies, so that they don't grow angry, and cause me to mess with lj all night instead of working on my paper.
Anyway. Wanted to get that recorded while it was fresh. Now to shower and check for ticks and stop rubbing my eyes with fingers that may or may not be covered with urushiol and see if the bruises on my calves are going to turn pretty colors, and then for my much-too-long list of things that still need to get done on much-too-little sleep. Also? That van had the *worst* fracturing shocks of any vehicle I've ever ridden in, hands down. I think I'm getting a headache. On the upside, my cold seems to be mostly gone, yay.
So I staggered out of bed and halfway across campus to meet the others and got there just before they left. The trip started up at Port Deposit, where the Susquehanna River meets the Chesapeake Bay, and followed the fall line on back to College Park. At Port Deposit, we clambered up an old tonalite quarry. No, wait, not tonalite, granodiorite. Or was it tonalite after all? (Actually it all looked like gneiss to me.) It was one of those places known only to geologists, people who like guns too much, and people who need a dumping place for old equipment (like rusty iron things the exactly the size and shape of an Apollo landing capsule, or entire tractor-trailers being slowly buried in greenery, or a set of very damp textbooks, including log/trig tables and Basic Physics.) It was very damp and slimy and green and full of artifacts. Some of the rocks actually had a coating of blue lead minerals from the decay of old cartridges, how cool is *that*? And somebody had been using old Earthlink CDs as skeet, which was very amusing. I found myself wondering if maybe I shouldn't go into archeology too, because the human traces were so much more interesting than the rocks. I did get to see allanite, though. How exciting.
The next stop was at the Hunt Valley Mall, to admire the Sutter Schist and Cockeysville Marble. (Apparently the other van was having a party in between stops, complete with Muppets mix CDs, but our van just alternately studied and slept. I can't say I was disappointed.) Did you know that the first few dozen feet of the Washington Monument were built with stone from the Cockeysville Marble? I do now. Only it wasn't *that* Cockeysville Marble, it was part of the Cockeysville Marble back closer to where the type specimen is, because the Washington Monument isn't striped glittery black and red with biotite (although wouldn't it be cool if it was?) The Sutter Schist is a very mica-y mica schist that looks like it's covered with pimples, because it's chock full of garnets. And supposedly other stuff, including kyanite. The professors got way too excited about the kyanite. And the banging on things with hammers. I pulled out my pocket knife to demonstrate that yes, the hardness of kyanite does vary depending on which direction you scratch in-- that was the second of four times I magically pulled something out of my field bag that somebody was asking for. Not counting the Trusty Water Bottle, either. And by the time we were at Hunt Valley, crawling about between the two levels of rock cuts (full of trace fossils of upper Cenozoic steel-toothed rock borer worms), the sun was coming in and out and the temperature was varying by the minute between chilly and broiling. I finished the first refill of the bottle of water there.
We stopped for lunch in Liberty, at the Twin Kiss Drive-In. This is something I love about the geology department; every time we go on a field trip, we stop at some little random family-owned local place, because all the professors are the sort who just sort of idly boycott Big Business as a matter of course, and assume everybody else also prefers Twin Kiss or Barbara Frietchie's to McDonald's or Cracker Barrel. This has never been the case on any other group trips, where the tendency is to wimp out and go with the easiest common denominator. (This makes me think I *am* in the right place, maybe. Of course it has nothing to do with rocks, just me having mad crushes on *all* the geology profs, but hey.) Twin Kiss had about fifteen different kinds of frozen dessert drinks, but I just got their homemade root beer. It was definitely homemade root beer; it had that sort of grassy gamy aftertaste that's shared by good root beer and birch beer and sarsparilla, and also horehound candy and teaberry gum (and sometimes even really strong maple stuff) that tastes like trees. It's not exactly entirely pleasant, but it cuts through the boring sweetness that's all you get in the national brands, and it wasn't strong enough to be off-putting in this one.
Right after lunch we went up to Mineral Hill, which was at the end of a long trail which was uphill both ways. Did I mention that I'm almost comically out of shape? It was incredibly pretty, with the sun shifting in and out and the spring flowers out and the dogwoods blooming overhead and everything still sort of damp, the trail covered with pine needles and Liberty Reservoir glinting off through the trees and ferns uncurling themselves. However - gah - I made it up without embarassing myself, and I wasn't the last one to make it, but just barely, and if I hadn't had the Trusty Water Bottle refilled at lunch I don't know what I would have done.
Mineral Hill, it turns out, is a pile of rubble at the top of a hill, that has a lot of large pieces of sulphide and other interesting minerals. It was much more reminiscent of trying to snatch shark's teeth out of the waves, actually, because you waited until the sun came out from behind the clouds, scanned for anything shiny, and then had to grab it quick before the sun went away again and you lost it. I found lots of bits of malachite and talc and magnetite and biotite, so after the Revolution, if we find ourselves in sudden need of green paint pigment, or baby powder, or cores for electromagnets, or, you know, *body glitter*, my l33t rockfinding skills will save the day. (... surely somebody's written a post-apocalypse fic in *some* fandom featuring the trials of having to ration body glitter... Somebody? Linkage?)
The last stop was more granodiorite at a roadcut in Ellicott City. The last stop is always a roadcut by some busy street near a convienience store where we can't hear anything for the cars and don't really care anyway at that point because we're all dreaming of home and rest. The granodiorite was supposed to be really cool because it had epidote and titanite and sphene, which supposedly almost never occur in igneous rocks, but you couldn't prove it by me. This particular roadcut was also near a trendy little coffee shop called the Old Mill, and everybody else was crowding in to get drinks, and I was still thirsty and there was no tap or convenient broken aquifer from which to refill the Trusty Bottle, so I caved and bought something too. In this case it was an "Italian Soda", which seemed to be an excuse to charge a buck fifty for twelve ounces of tonic water with flavor syrup in it. Wait, isn't that a just plain *soda*, the kind you get at a good old-fashioned *American* soda fountain? *sigh*. Oh well, the regional soft drinks thing is a tradition and a hobby and a notable eccentricity of mine, and in some parts of Maryland, "overpriced at a trendy coffee shop" *is* what you get for a regional soft drink. They were also selling knickknacks and coffee beans and tea. I debated also buying Mom some tea for Mother's Day, just to see the look on her face, but she *really* doesn't need any more fancy teas, right Mom? heh.
And then it was home, and trudging back across campus, and I found an offering of home-made bread and pasta left at my doorstep. Is this a May Day thing? Perhaps I should leave it there for the dormitory fairies, so that they don't grow angry, and cause me to mess with lj all night instead of working on my paper.
Anyway. Wanted to get that recorded while it was fresh. Now to shower and check for ticks and stop rubbing my eyes with fingers that may or may not be covered with urushiol and see if the bruises on my calves are going to turn pretty colors, and then for my much-too-long list of things that still need to get done on much-too-little sleep. Also? That van had the *worst* fracturing shocks of any vehicle I've ever ridden in, hands down. I think I'm getting a headache. On the upside, my cold seems to be mostly gone, yay.
no subject
It's because you were sick, and I made a whole lot Friday night, and you don't eat enough;-)
no subject
All right, all right! I'll eat! It looks very good. Although note that the fairies still don't seem to be on my side with this paper.
no subject
But still better than storebought bread.
no subject
Can you find good flaking stone? Almost everything around here sucks . . . great, now I've got bunnies for the body glitter fic(s). I promise that none of them will use the term "Cockeysville Marble" as a euphemism.
no subject
I don't think I'd let kids play there (unless one of them was the Antichrist, and capable of taking care of himself) but it's great fun for not-exactly-grownups! Lynn found a Terrapene hiding amoung the remains of an old engine, and I didn't quite convince her to write "Fear the Turtle!" on its shell in magic marker.
no subject
Although the *ideal* knapping material, the one all the others only approach, is all over the place, by the side of the road, in the woods, in lots of pretty colors. (That is, I've still just been using found bottle glass when I try.)
And yay! Feel the spirit of postapocalyptic body glitter!
no subject
*makes note to write body glitter fic*
Tea
(Anonymous) 2005-05-01 05:40 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Tea
no subject
*fights small urge to write Golgafrincham telephone sanitizer/lack of body glitter on prehistoric Earth fic* *succeeds* Too bad for you. d-:
no subject
Because *of course* they would feel the lack of body glitter. It would be a *tragedy* to them, something that had to be remedied *right now*. And then one day Ford's little Golgafrincham girl comes running up to him, in the small tiger-print bikini that the commitee decided was to the be new women's uniform when the last of the track suits ran out, and she's all over glitter, in her hair, on her face, and her hands as she waves at him, and a bunch of other places some of which actually looked pretty bloody uncomfortable; well, no actually Ford thought they looked quite well, but *he* wouldn't want to have glitter there, and she smiled at him, full of youthful optimism, and said, in the same tone of voice Arthur used whenever he thought he'd found tea, "Look, Ford! I told you it wasn't hopeless! There's a whole beach covered with body glitter up in the mountains!" and he felt his heart swell with a hopeless *something*, looking at her, although possibly it was just the slightly suspicious fox stew she'd cooked him last night...
no subject
Hmm, I don't think my mental Ford is ever going to be quite like movie!Ford.
no subject
Also, it was you who was going to write it. I was just expressing squee.