Rocking Backyard sale

  I went to the Gem and mineral show back in August ( here ), while I was there I met some interesting people.  One person in particular I had a good time talking with.  He was a vendor and my son bought a geode from him and had it cracked open.  Because I got a couple of things from him he gave me a flier describing a backyard rock sale he was going to have in East Texas on Sept 24.
  I took the flier to be polite and almost filed it away in my trash can but for some reason I decided to keep it.  I never really thought I would go but I kept on thinking about all the nice stuff this guy had at the gem & mineral show.
  Saturday the 24 rolled around and I was surprised we had nothing on the calendar.  Usually there is some kid activity we have to go to like a football game or outing.  My youngest son spent the night at a friends house and my husband and I found ourselves all alone.  My birthday & my second son's birthday is in a couple of days and my husband wanted to know what else we had going on this week.  We looked at the calendar and realized that next weekend we were going be very busy unloading pumpkins and working in the pumpkin patch.  My husband said if we are going to celebrate it we better do it today, (my son is away at college so we are not planning on doing much with him for his birthday - we'll do it when he gets a break and can come home and visit).  He asked me what I really would like to do to celebrate it. I thought about it and had a hard time coming up with anything, but then I remembered the flier I suggested going to backyard rock sale.  I was surprised my husband said sure why not and we got in the car and drove an hour to this rock sale.
  Needless to say I was in seventh heaven totally enjoying it, while my husband was bored.  I was very thankful there was a mall close by and he was able to go there and kill some time at it.  After awhile he came back to see if I was done yet but I wasn't.  He had found a football game on the car radio station and said for me to take all the time I wanted because he was going to go sit in the car and listen to it.  So I was able to spend all the time I wanted to at that place. The flier said there were 35 Tons!! of rocks and I believed.  I was able to get some stuff that I probably would never have been able to get on my own, considering where I live. 

I knew I was going to enjoy this place the moment I saw how his storage shed was design with these shelves of rocks on the outside.

 Then you notice the storage bins all crammed full of rocks from all over the world.  Like these:

And here's this one where you can see how many are in each bin.

And this  was his back yard.  I was amazed that they would have so many rocks.

 I asked him were they all came from and he told me that his son was a geologist and got him interested in rocks and how he could sell them and make some money.  He said he acquires industrial equipment and sell it to others.  Frequently when he gets stuff there is rocks that come with the whole package deal.  Through his son they've been able to pick out the stuff that will sell.  They supply a lot of people with the stones that they use to do lapidary work.
  Now on to the stuff that I acquired.

 Left top - a crystallized bivalve.  Top Right gastropod Exogyra Ponderosa, and bottom is a piece of a ammonite shell.

Oolitic sandstone

turrelite

 With this one I learned something new.  Turrelite is 'A Texas asphalt shale' (I need to pass this word to Evelyn when she gets to T's at Georneys).  The picture above is the weathered surface, while the one below is the cracked open surface.  

turrelite

Amethyst

 I liked this Amethyst because it had such nice crystalline form, plus it showed how there was no cleavage in it but had a conchoidal fracture to it which is so typical of quartz. 

Blue Azurite and green Malachite

Sphalerite

Sodalite

 This one intrigued me.  It is a gneiss but some of the minerals were hard to figure out.  The guy I got it from was stumped by this one too.  I've taken a couple of different images of it at different angles.  I think the black minerals are in the garnet family based on the shape.  But they were definitely altered. 

 Above the top of the rock had some shiny stuff that looks gold to copper in color.  (Any insight on this rock would be greatly appreciated.)

Muscovite and Muscovite in a granite type rock.

 The guy told me the rock below had tourmaline in it and was a granite.  I thought he was totally wrong on that one - I thought the black mineral would be a hornblende and is probably  in andesite or a tuff.

(Cath made a comment and so I decided to edit and add a few more pictures of this rock from different angles.

petrified wood

I was able to get all sorts of petrified wood.  I could tell they obtained a lot of it and that was what most of the lapidary people were looking at. I liked the one above because you could see a branch on it.  Also it had quartz veins running through it that may be opal.

Petrified wood

 Looking at the petrified wood I could tell it came from different places.  I asked the vendor but he didn't know where it came from.  The bottom piece looked like it may have been from Arizona while the other two big pieces look like they may have been from south Louisiana.

Obsidian

 I liked the rainbow obsidian because it did have the two colors it it and showed good conchodial fracturing. The other one I liked because it had feldspar phenocrysts in it.

Basalt

 I liked this piece of basalt because I could see the columnar joints on it.

Anthracite

 At first I thought this maybe another piece of obsidian or basalt.  But when I picked it up it was lighter than the other rocks like that.  It was in a separate bin with a lot of other rocks similar to it.  The more I looked at the rocks in the bin I realized they were probably Anthracite.  I need to do more tests on it before I'll know for sure if it anthracite or so something else.

 There were lots of geodes and parts of geodes to look at. Here's some that I just called it chalcedony or agate. Below is another one that I liked the colors that were in it.

Agate

I liked the color in the one below.  I thought it was an unusual yellow color. 

chert/ agate

There were some good samples of quarts.

clear quartz with hexagonal, trigonal-trapezohedral crystalline stucture, next to some rose quartz

 

I thought this was an usual looking rock.  The vendor and I tried to figure it out.  I think at one time there was a shell there that has dissolved away and was later filled in with a siliceous solution.  The pieces that chip away and revile a fresh surface that looks like chert.

This next rock I really like.  When I saw the side I was WOW!! a minnie normal fault!  With the right side the down side.

 Then when I looked at the top of it, it was so neat to see the ripple marks on it.  It was definitely a keeper and one I had to get.

Rhyolite

 

 The vendor called this one Chinese paper ??? but I forgot the whole name.  To me it was just a basalt with feldspar in it, most likely orthoclase, plagioclase (thanks for the correction Cath).

Gypsum/selenite

Unakite

 This one through me.  I thought it was plagioclase in a olivine, but the vendor gave it a specific name so I wrote it down.  When I got home I was able to find it on my one chart.  I like learning new stuff like this.

Aventurine

 At first I thought these were the same.  But when it came time to get them I found out one was amazonite and the other aventurine.  When I got home I couldn't remember which was which and had to look them up in my references.  I think I got them right because the Aventurine is associated with quartz. While the amazonite is a green variety of microcline.

amazonite

jasper

scoria

 and finally this one - a gneiss.

With that I wish you a gneiss day.