It's Gneiss to Meet You!

Quartz and Granite. Now really. Between the two which sounds like something you want to hold and admire? "Quartz" has this lovely rolling feel in the mouth ending with a little elegant buzz. It starts and ends with rare letters making it a valuable word in Scrabble (24 points!!) .

"Granite" on the other hand sounds hard, irritating, and just plain undesirable. GRR. GRRan-ITe. The only time I remember the word "granite" being associated with anything good was in the Flintstones cartoons when "Gary Granite" came to town. That and granite countertops. I'm dating myself of course.

This week's Outdoor Hour Challenge had us focusing on these two specific rocks. Once again I had to smile with gritted teeth at the idea of rock study. (The grit was from the rocks I bet.) But Mei's enthusiasm was infectious and so we gathered up our supplies. 

Finding samples of these two should be no problem in our area. The Appalachians are chock-full. Quartz I knew. It's everywhere. We also could cheat because I had purchased a beautiful pink quartz at the Penn's Cave gift shop last summer. But not so sure about the other. Free to gather whatever she found, Mei picked up several interesting-looking samples right from the rock-paved farm road near home, delivered from a near-by quarry.  

But first some general knowledge.

Interactive Rock Cycle: thorough and fun!

Mei spent a LOT of time on the Interactive Rock Cycle site the Outdoor Challenge directed us to. It was great and there was even a test at the end that I could print out and include in a portfolio of her work (we're not textbook peeps).We were beginning to draw conclusions about our mystery rocks.

Our fav lenses especially the Carson Microbrite (right)

Now for the hands-on stuff. Using the printable from Barb's site, we recorded the various aspects of our rocks and compared with the field guides we had. I really like the simplicity of the DK Pocket Guide to Rocks and Minerals as a starting point. Another guide that I love is the National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Mid-Atlantic. It covers EVERYTHING in our neck-of-the-woods from skies, to rocks,  to plants, animals, insects, even weather. They publish similar guides for many other regions in the U.S.

Field Guides to rock on with.

Other areas available too!

Well, in the end the beautiful--did I say BEAUTIFUL?--black-and-white stripey ones were Gneiss. (pronounced Nice) They were very nice Gneisses too, don't you think? According to my Audubon guide, "gneiss is a metamorphic rock common in the Appalachians; forms from granites and other rocks rich in quartz and feldspars."

Gneiss. And a little moss.

Since we have taken up the hobby of geo-caching, we have discovered that we are in the middle of several interesting geological formations. One of them is the Baltimore Gneiss formation in Patapsco State Park. The other is at Fox Rock Quarry in (ta-da) Granite, MD. An interesting story tells of the Smithsonian Institution in the mid-1800's sending a Dr. Owen on an inspection of building material sources. On arriving he wrote of the granite

 "For about a mile square at this locality is an outburst of quartzose, granite of magnificent quality, both as regards beauty of appearance, compactness of structure and uniformity of color, texture and composition. I have never seen anything superior in this country. Indeed, I doubt whether it can be excelled in any country. It cannot be surpassed for strength and durability by any building material in the world."

Well, don't we feel special!  As soon as my foot is finished healing, we intend to find both caches and see the examples first-hand. Go to GeoCaching.com to learn more about this fun, educational hobby!
However we WERE able to meander over to a neighboring quarry, Vinci Stone, to talk with their friendly saleswoman and learn a lot about what goes into the business of beautifying our properties with Nature's mineral reserves. 

Landscape and building stone from across the country
 and around the world

 
We were especially captivated by the beauty and variety of materials, especially when it came to the granite that was displayed for countertops. (See?? Pale green and peach! It can be gorgeous.)
And then lo and behold, we were pointed to the mammoth block of LAVA! It had been shipped from California, and is looking for a good home if anyone on the East Coast has use for a black rock the size of a Volkswagen. 

Granite counters and a lava boulder just her size

 

So we have another nice page in our nature journals and a lot of new knowledge. And I have a better attitude toward rocks. (But I'd still rather paint clouds. ;-)  )
Thanks, Outdoor Hour Challenge! To see what others are learning about rocks visit the Outdoor Hour Blog Carnival at Handbook of Nature Study!


Got rocks in YOUR socks? Tell Mother All About It!

Menu Plan Monday: Sloppy Start

 Want the Ground Hog Day activities links? Keep scrolling :-)

Good Morning/Afternoon/Middle of the Night! An icy, sleety, freezing-rainy start to our week in the Baltimore/Washington area, the perfect "recipe" (HAHAHA, I"m so funny on five hours sleep!) for a three-hour commute for my blessed husband. When it comes to rush hour length, our area is Number One in the country! Rah, Rah. We're not even close to NYC or LA's populations, but because of the geographical lay-out of the city--straddling a river that chokes everyone down to only two portals--,there are simply no alternative routes to avoid a vehicular  lock-down.

Blizzard of 2010. City simply closed shop for a week. Not that our government needs an excuse for a shut-down.

And in this area of already stressed-out government employees who are transferred here from all over the country, many whose hometowns are in milder areas of the nation, a smidgeon of snow is a call for pandemonium.

So, if terrorists want to run the show, they don't need to get all fancy with suicide planes and such. They just need a snowstorm and a couple of strategically placed disabled trucks on the Beltway. They'll be in control  for days.

WELL! Enough of gloom and doom. You came here to get some recipe ideas!

So let's find something from 5 Dinners in an Hour to calm the nerves and warm our tummies and hearts in this dead of winter. And take heart! Groundhog Day, the halfway point, is this weekend!! Yay for the weather prognosticator, Punsutawney Phil !

For my homeschooling friends who like turning anything into a teachable moment, here are some links for learning and fun:
Free Punxsutawney Phil Lesson Plan: Free Groundhog Day Printables, Coloring Pages, and Activities for Kids 

Enchanted Learning: Ground Hog Day 

Monday

Slow Cooked Chicken and Dumplings (perfect start, eh?)
Green salad

Tuesday

Spinach Lasagna
Green salad

Wednesday

Tilapia Tacos
Sliced avocadoes
Black beans

Thursday

Slow Cooked Vegetarian Chili
Whole wheat rolls

Friday--Co-op, Dance class and Middle School Youth Group

Dinner out for Mother and Father Robin

Saturday --Ground Hog Day!

DITK (Dad in the Kitchen!) Gotta be something German, Father R, to recall your Western PA roots (home of the celebrated rodent)!

Sunday

Left-over Buffet

I'm feeling better already! How about you? Got Menu? Tell Mother All About It!
Then find more inspiration at Organizing Junkie!

Bird's-Eye View of the Week: Inauguration!

     Now how many posts are you going to read this week about a blogger's family member who marched in the Inaugural Parade? Well you can say at least one. 

   Our 17-year-old nephew, my middle brother's oldest, made history marching with the Black Horse Troop of Culver Academies last Monday. While we couldn't be at the parade itself--broken feet are excluded from standing in the cold for eight hours--we watched anxiously on C-SPAN for about 2 hours until near the end they arrived, all 90+ black stallions and riders, all carrying American flags on the 100th anniversary of their first appearance at Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. It was a thrilling sight. Or as my brother put it, Nephew will always have the mental image of the President saluting him! 


   We did get to visit the troop at the Prince George's Show Place Arena while they groomed the pampered mules hard-working steeds for their Big Day. Middle Brother wasn't sure if we'd be interested, but Mei's addiction to all things equestrian made the opportunity a must for us. That it was a cloudless, balmy day in January helped.

The Black Horse Troop horses are Friesians, notable for their wavy manes and tails.

  

 Late on the night of the 21st, while still watching C-SPAN (simply to see what the First and Vice-First Ladies were wearing to the Balls), the network opened the mikes to callers. One rambled on about how we have "checks and balances" of Republicans and Democrats in office. WHAT??? 

No mention of political parties.

    The next day I was still raving over this woman's ignorance (and C-SPAN's duplicity by not screening their callers). But of course as a dutiful homeschooling parent, I left no teachable moment unturned. So ensued a discussion of the REAL Checks and Balances . Thanks to a handy workbook, The Complete Book of Presidents and States,  lying around, we were able to cover that ground fairly easily and in a lively fashion.

    The rest of the week was less dramatic. Mei got sick which in fact counts as drama around here because of its rarity. And she's the most fun-loving sick person I've ever met! Her illness combined with my healing heel and instep, topped off with just enough snow to cancel extracurriculars, made for a quiet week. We learned to team-tackle fire-building to keep the living room toasty where I have been propping up the injured appendage. And we have our birdfeeders up and running again after a whole year off. We're gearing up for February's Great Backyard Bird Count and Handbook of Nature Study's February Outdoor Hour Challenges. 

   Speaking of the Outdoor Challenges, we are wrapping up our January studies of rocks this week. Just the word ROCKS sounds dull. But the challenges have created lots of appeal. More about our geological adventures here.

     We completed our first track of artists in the Meet the Masters program at the co-op where I teach art. The final artist was Andy Warhol. I don't care who you are or where you come from, this guy is going to elicit a response. Kids are no different. I'll have more to tell about them soon.

    In the days ahead, the weather forecast is for sleet and snow for the first morning rush hour of the new work week, never a good thing around the Washington Beltway.  I've already cancelled the follow-up x-ray of the snapped metatarsal. However I "feel the heal" and we can look forward to our long walks at the Conservancy again soon.  The dog is elated.

   That was our Inaugural Week. What was yours? Tell Mother All About It! 
    Hook up with others at Weekly Wrap-up!

Rocks: Up Close and Personal

Our enthusiasm for the study of rocks--not the sexiest sounding subject for most of us--has been bumped up several notches by incorporating the fun, hands-on ideas from the Outdoor Hour Challenges for January. This time it was to study them up close. You know, REAL close. Magnifying glass close!

The Collection. Penny and nail for testing hardness.

Mei had gathered several rocks from walks in our area as per the previous challenges' instructions. But we were doubly prepared because of our field trip last summer to Penn's Cave! Penn's Cave, located in the middle of Pennsylvania near State College, is notable for being "America's Only All-Water Cavern."

But not only do you traverse the cavern by BOAT, you also are treated to a mini-museum of the history and geology of the area, a wildlife park, and a HUGE gift shop. If you're ever in the region, go. It was there that I picked out several samples of minerals as a surprise for my (doubtful) future gemologist .

Now to the Study. After each of us chose a rock we dug out all of our magnification tools, pencils, colored pencils, our printables, and our new nature notebooks (Vol. 2!). Our preferred tool was the
Carson MM-24 MicroBrite Pocket Microscope

Carson Microbrite

With its built-in light and 20x-40x zoom, we really could get in close on our subjects. And for its modest price, we can bring it with us into the field. We used the Outdoor Hour Challenge grid from the January Newsletter as a kind of Bingo card, crossing out the squares that held descriptive terms of our chosen specimen. Then we began drawing.

You can see how bright the Microbrite really is. Lives up to its name!

Drawing rocks is challenging. There is no recognizable form that simplifies the result for an amateur artist like there would be for, say, a cat. This is a GOOD thing actually because it demands careful observation! No symbolic marks on paper like triangle ears and whiskers.

A sample of Purple Mica and the drawing

But we gained heightened appreciation for scientific illustrators when we tackled that magnified view. Holey, moley, was it hard!!

Step 1: Zero in on an interesting feature. Hold the scope there. Slip.Whoops. Relocate. Hold again.

Step 2: Draw. Oh, yeah.You have to do that with one eye cuz the other one is on the 'scope. Whoops.Relocate. Hold. Draw.
And back-and-forth with one eye on the rock and the other on the drawing. Impossible, really. So we fell back on blind contour drawing, an artist's method whereby your pencil follows the edge that your eyes are looking at without YOU looking at your pencil. Then we finished the drawings with our colored pencils and some memory!

So now when we see those minutely detailed, worthy-of-framing studies by professional scientific illustrators of the past, we will be in greater awe of their persistence. And in sympathy of the eyestrain!

Mei's Purple Mica

Mom's Granite/Quartz combo

Hook up with the Outdoor Hour Challenge Newsletters at  Handbook of Nature Study and check out other rock-ologists discoveries! Got any great rock-gathering sources? Tell Mother All About It!

Rose Garden in Winter

My name is Leslie and I am an addict.

Of perfectionism.

I have spent too too TOO many hours perfecting the look and feel that I want to express on this blog. To the point that I finally went too too TOO far by attempting to upload a custom font to Blogger (the nerve). Not only did I spend several hours following the very well-defined steps by Kevin and Amanda on their uber-cute blog only to have my font conversion efforts thwarted by some Microsoft "we don't recognize the program that created this" gar-bage [insert French accent here], but then all Hades let loose and suddenly a new background that I only temporarily tried on took possession of my blog and wouldn't let go its grip.

It was more HOURS. I had so run out of ideas that I was ready to create a whole new blog and import. But I didn't trust that THAT would work either. And the repercussions were too horrible to consider.

Finally I offered up a prayer. Why is it that we (or at least I) turn to prayer as a LAST resort rather than a FIRST one?

Within a few minutes, I had a new stratagem, was led to new links, found this much-more perfect background than I was previously using (which, HORRORS, had not matched the shade of blue-green in my banner), AND discovered the why of the other resurfacing background. All within fifteen minutes of a feeble prayer.

Don't believe? Try it yourself sometime. Just don't wait hours.
So a BIG thanks to my Lord and Savior and a shout-out to The Background/Graphics Fairy for my rose garden in the depths of my winter of discontent.

P.S. So whaddaya think of my blog anyway? Tell Mother All About It!