Rocks - Jewelry and Building

Tomorrow we'll fight the single-lane traffic to get south of the cities and attend the Minnesota Mineral Club's annual rock show and sale. We look forward to this every year. If the weather is good and temps aren't too cold, DH can spend more than an hour looking through rough and choosing rocks to buy. Eventually, after retirement, he'll settle down with his rock saw and cabbing machine to make pretty finished stones for me to use.

Slabs of agate and jasper varieties are the foundation of
many jewelry projects. We love working with stone. 

I also enjoy looking at the rocks. The various colors and combinations of the jaspers and agates that are sold there enchant me. As long as I'm bundled up, I'll also happily look through the rocks sold in the rough or in slab form from the outside dealers. Indoors, the vendors tend to sell more finished jewelry or polished rocks. Although we'll look around there too, it's the outside that really pulls us in.

The weather will be good, but the traffic won't be. Every road we
need to travel down will be single lane as construction pushes to
days when the snows stop the work. 

Unfortunately we'll have to deal with road construction. Up here, road construction goes from March through November, as long as the snow doesn't fall heavily. We haven't had our first snowfall yet, but we're closer to that than to 80 degree heat. This weekend, however, will actually be quite pleasant in the afternoons, reaching temps in the mid to upper 60's.

Next year we'll do the next stage of the project - stripping,
leveling and resetting the patio. We have a few different paving
stones that we're checking out while we figure out what we
want the new patio to look like. The patio is 60+ years old, so
it's about time to replace it. 

That's making DH quite happy because he's almost finished with this year's work on my castle. The walls are completely laid and he's been working on resetting the steps and adding another one, increasing the run to help control erosion. He has two more steps to set and then he can start gluing the capstones onto them and getting small rocks set behind each tread. With luck and if everything working smoothly, that should be almost complete by the end of today. We're winding down, which is good, because our temps are more often in the 30's to 50's than higher. Have a great weekend, I know I will.