PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

the making of a cab: a thunderegg teardrop with red plumes 2011-04-01 - 9:13 a.m. � 2011 by elaine radford I have a picture up top of what is approximately the 100th cabochon I've cut since I started cutting gems again this year. It all started with a random thunderegg, one of the very few that I overlooked from years ago, when I was selling them cheap, by the lot, at the gem and mineral shows. I didn't know what they were, and I frankly thought they were ugly when we cut them open. Too much Rhyolite or whatever it is, mixed in with the lovely Agate. I was looking for crystals and overlooked the rest. More recently, when I got back into the hobby, I learned what the New Agers of New Orleans never knew, at least not in the late 80s and early 90s. Thundereggs are a hobby in and of themselves, and I shudder to think how many collectible eggs I sold for pennies on the dollar. Ho well. I still had this one, and we decided to cut it into slabs, making windows out of the red/pink Agate, crystal vugs, and browny-yellow softer material. I put a slab on eBay in late 2010, and the man who bought it told me that he thought it was from "Big Diggins" in Deming, New Mexico. I bought it in the early 1990s, maybe 1992, but I have no idea how long ago that it might have been collected. In any case, I figured that an old-time rockhounder's guess was better than mine, so I think of it now as "Big Diggins." It's an evocative name even if we'll never know the ultimate origin for sure. So I have all these neato slabs. The plan is really to make them into windows -- display pieces. However, I'll need a flat lap to do that, and right now I don't have the space for yet another piece of equipment, so I've been focusing on the cabs. A light bulb went off one day when I was fingering my cache of slabs. Why not try to use one of these thunderegg slabs to make a cab? I couldn't be sure that the softer material would polish...but I decided that there was no harm in taking one slab out of several for the experiment. Here is the cab next to what remains of the slab that it came from: The more I puzzled over the slab, the more I realized that if I wanted to make a pure red cab, then the cabochon in question would be very small indeed. There were swirls and patterns and hidden healed fractures to work around, not to mention vugs large and small all over the place. You can see a hint of magic marker remaining from where I marked up a possible area for cabbing, before I thought better of it. Finally, though, I roughed out a large teardrop-shaped area and trimmed it on the trim saw before taking it to the cabbing wheel. Problem. The pattern I selected was a little too large for my equipment. Problem. I was thinking that I'd make a flat top cab to best show the picture. The two problems are related, because they meant that I spent a very long time trying to get a good first grind on the cab. The flat top idea simply didn't work. Too many scratches and flat spots kept appearing in the middle. That was a project for a flat lap, my friend. Eventually, I gave up and went with putting a slight dome on the material, but I think I put an hour of shaping and grinding that I didn't need to, while I was developing the busted "flat top" concept. After I went back to the dome, I still struggled because of the size of the piece, but eventually I got a beautiful polish that shows off the unique pattern. And that, friends and neighbors, is no April Fool. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford