I feel much the same. I used to make miles of grape vine wreathes and build mini-dams and rhododendron water wheels… Andy is a big inspiration in the phlosphr household. .
Water wheels? Did you read The Yearling?
My Dad’s a really incredible guy, but he’s never been very good at getting little kids interested in things they might otherwise find boring 
When I brought him an interesting rock, his attitude was “It’s not a fossil, so who cares?” I’d bring him a fossil and unless it was a particularly unusual one, he wouldn’t show a lot of interest. He’s a gruff and complicated guy who doesn’t communicate well, it took me until my mid twenties to really begin to understand him and appreciate the kinds of experiences he had opened me up to. (I think my geology classes in college helped a lot.)
I’ve gotten my neices and nephews more interested in geology by explaining the whole context to them - the differences between igneous and sedimentary rock, how they are created, how you can look at a mountain or a canyon and observe how it formed. That’s really what makes it all work for me. Dad’s started getting better at it too - he’s always bringing the kids little geodes to crack and look for crystals. You’ll have to ask them in twenty years if it works
Of course!
Thats really great! My father is a complex individual too - but he was of the engineer variety. You explain it so well, you show your true quality and fondness for your dad, when you say it like that! I hope my children - again, we do not have any yet - feel the same about me when they are of age.
No schist! Me too!
I’m a geology major. I’ve been a lifelong Lake Superior agate collector and that is what got me interested. Rocks and minerals are beautiful, and each tells its own story about what things were like when it formed (or deformed).
Mrs. Urquhart and I share our home with a cat, a dog, a fish fossil and several trilobite fossils, along with her rock and mineral specimen collection. She’s much more into rocks and minerals than I am, but I really enjoy fossils and thinking about the living organism that’s behind it – what life on Earth was like, and the other species it interacted with.
There’s just something awfully cool about holding something that was living many millions of years before mankind was possible, and will be around for quite a while after mankind is gone.
I guess my contribution to this thread is laughable, but I’ve gotten rather interested in pretty rocks and minerals by watching Cash and Treasures on the Travel Channel. They air at 10:00pm and 10:30pm and they show how you can mine for your own gold, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, opals, etc. at various locations around the country. A coworker and I would like to travel to one of these sites when we can get some time off and try our luck at getting some big, honkin stones.
I collect rocks, fossils and artifacts. I like to gather and collect, I can’t say why, but it’s part off why I like to grow things also.
I’ve got a metric ton of rock shit. Let’s see, I have:
[ul]
[li]bookends, petrified wood slabs, geodes, beads and semi-precious stones from the Gem and Mineral Show in Tucson[/li][li]quartz crystal points, fluorite crystals and pyrite from mine tailings in the Washington Cascades[/li][li]bones and fossils picked up in my back yard in Cody, Wyoming[/li][/ul]
Best find? A huge fossilized critter tooth embedded in a rock matrix. Very cool.
Here is my favorite rock shop Woolly Mammoth Rock shop. They have three bathtub size amethyst pipes in the entryway. I could spend days there.
I had a fossilized tooth until a landlady stole it. She was caught in other peoples apartments, and it disapeared after she saw it. It was one of my best finds.
Me! I love rocks! Just like everybody says.
And let me tell you, Egypt is one heck of a place to find them, so plan a visit here sometime and make sure you hit the White Desert if you really want to see some beautiful fossils, crystals, and sedimentary rock.
Sorry, I think it was probably fake. In one of his books (sorry, I don’t recall which; I’ve read nearly all of them) Stephen Jay Gould talks about how so many fossils that people buy are counterfeit. In my more naive days I bought a “meteorite” in Hong Kong … now, thanks to a geologist friend, the internet, and my older-and-wiser attitude, I know it is fake.
My husband once bought a whole lizard encased in amber in SWEDEN, which you would think would have enough controls to limit faking these things. I took one look and said “now, you know, that has GOT to be fake.” And he paid USD 70 for it, too.
I was trying to figure out how to tell if it was fake or not (couldn’t make it generate static electricity by rubbing but was having trouble with my real amber too) when I hit on the idea of looking at it under ultraviolet light. We bought such a light because it is SO COOL to collect rocks in Egypt and look at them under UV – some glow in surprising ways and look totally different than they do under ordinary light.
Anyway, the fake amber looked cloudy under UV, quite different from the real stuff.
So rock lovers, beware of what you buy!
Beaucarnea, I feel like I learned more about you from seeing those photographs and knowing that you stack rocks than I’ve learned in all your other posts. That is awesome.
I have a videotape of an artist whose medium is nature. He sometimes stacks rocks. I can’t think of his name, but he is a Scot. I will see if I can find photographs of some of his work to share with you.
Like most kids, I learned about fossils in elementary school. What freaked me out was finding that there were thousands of them in the gravel driveway at our house in Tennessee. (The gravel was sort of a yellowish color.)
I still have the first pretty rock my mother gave me when I was seven and she’s given me many through the years. And I’ve added some. One from Walden Pond, another from where two rivers met and a county was formed, another handed to my mother from a stranger as she stood at a window on a train…
There is something that is so bonding about knowing people who love rocks just for their own sake. Either it’s there or it’s not.
Phlosphr. this is a very good thread.
The Scottish artist is Andy Goldsworthy. The film I saw was
It’s available on DVD from Amazon. It’s had at least ten four star reviews.
Rocks and fossils are just cool. I like them because they’re fascinating and because they’re often so beautiful. All I have right now, though, is a piece of obsidian, a chunk of citrine, and some tiny bits of amethyst, garnet, and hematite that I used to wear. I’d had them woven into my hair. I first became interested in gemstones, but then I learned that rocks were so much more than that. I’m not much of a collector–I hate having piles of stuff–but rocks and fossils are different somehow. I oohed and aahed at the OP’s links. I even like the little oyster shells in driveways and the miscellaneous little pebbles in creek beds.
Thank you for finding that, Zoe. I love Andy’s work. (And thank you for your kind words. Your words in the return to church thread are extrememly welcoming and kind- so… likewise. Nice to meet you. 
)
The weather is beautiful today (80!!) so I just snapped some quick pics of the arrowheads and knives I found nearby. I believe a couple are agate, and of course, flint- but I can’t identify the rest. I don’t know if they came from nearby or not, as flint is usually hidden and I don’t know what is inside unless a previous native abandoned some work. But the bird points are extra tiny- smaller than a penny- and the marbles are cool, if anyone wants to have a look. And I can supply better pics after the sun goes down if any experts have anything to add.
7 years ago my boyfriend figured out how to make me happy, and our second date was a kayak trip down the Nolichucky River near our home with his dad. (Gorgeous. Anyone within 3 hours of Asheville, NC or Johnson City TN should make a day trip. Wading, floating, or rafting up to class 3 and 4, and plenty of low grade quartz and granite as well as wind and water tortured limestone and sandstone, so the 'Chucky is fun for rockhounds, too.) The river was crowded and we had to wait awhile to put in, so I started wading in the shallows and finding huge round rocks to stack. J’s dad exchanged a couple of (she’s nuts) looks and comments with his son, then joined me. Took dad almost two hours to find balance, but he was hooked and thoroughly enthralled with his new game, so didn’t notice me carrying the occasional rock back to the truck bed to bring home. The river was wild with rafts, so we never did put the kayaks in- just had some lunch and stacked stones until our backs were sore. We all piled in the truck achy and satisfied, and all was well. Until dad realized why the truck couldn’t pull a hill. We drove home on groaning leaf springs with the bed tilted like a dump truck, but dad didn’t make me take out a single stone. That stack still stands at the end of the driveway of the home we share.
I love this thread, Phlosphr- funny how sentimental about inanimate objects most of us sound. Love hearing from the geology experts. I will try to scout some geodes in the next few days- if I find any, I will post and will be happy to ship Appalachain Mountain goodies to any of you guys.
Well, CairoCarol , I appreciate your concern but my friend the geologist assures me it is, in fact, quite authentic.
But I’m certain you’re right there are fakes out there, you should be careful. Things that seem too good to be true often are!
Mom: “Because they tell the history of the planet.”
Mom’s succint.