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.

page 15 of the online mineral museum: fun with fluorite 2010-12-30 - 9:47 a.m. all photos � 2010 by elaine radford Peachfront's Note: I already discussed the large purple Fluorite crystal that I keep as a writer's crystal. Now, for the rest of the collection... Ah, Fluorite. A beautiful and inexpensive stone, a little too soft for jewelry, but wonderful for carvings and cabinet collections. Also, one of those words that I just can't "see" how it's supposed to be spelled, so I'm confident that you will find it spelled wrong from time to time within the pages of Peachfront Speaks. Just enjoy the beauty of the stone and use a dictionary if you need to check the actual spelling. Above, we have a large carving of a Purple Fluorite Eagle. The wings are perfectly carved, so I need to take a shot from another angle sometime to show both wings in their full glory. It was a gem show splurge in 1994 or so, and for $150 I probably paid both too little and too much -- too much because we were paying down debts at the time and too little because, well, we'd never come close to replacing it for that price. It was one of those "steals" that if you see it, you grab it, because you'll regret it forever if you don't. It has given us a lot of pleasure for a lot of years now, that's for sure. No idea of the true resale value but I doubt I would take less than $800 for it. If I would sell it at all. I probably paid too much for this lovely polished slab below -- $50 in 1989 for green/purple/teal Chinese Fluorite. But it's a pretty one, isn't it? I have some inexpensive unpolished slabs as well on my "to do" list. Even if you have minimal money to spend on your collection, you probably have one of these inexpensive Fluorite spheres. The photo is slightly larger than life, as my egg is about the size of a Jumbo chicken egg. Healed fractures are to be expected in this material. The pride of the collection is this gargantuan Yellow (with just a tinge of Purple) single Fluorite crystal. Now that's a crystal with some heft to it. It's too heavy for me to lift, really, so I photographed the stone in place in the mineral cabinet with its little Fluorite friends all around it. To get an idea of the size, keep in mind that the small single purple crystal on the label saying, "Cave-in-Rock" is about the size of a small woman's pinky fingernail. (Heh. My pinky fingernail, to be precise.) This is my best Fluorite cluster. If you notice a small purple pebble to one side, well, that pebble's about the size of a U.S. quarter, so that will give you a rough idea of the size. I happen to have a couple of pieces of Fluorite cutting/carving material in the cabinet, and I'm pretty sure that I have other cuttable Fluorite around the house somewhere as well. Here's a couple of pieces, one yellow, one purple/teal. Two tips for Fluorite: 1) If you plan to wear it in jewelry, keep in mind that it's soft and prone to cleavage, so you don't want to wear it on bracelets or rings where it might get knocked into something. If you can wear Amber without knocking the bead-jeebus out of it, then you can wear Fluorite in the same way -- beads, pendants, earrings will be the safest. 2) I've always heard it recommended as a luck stone for students and writers. It won't do your homework for you, but if its beauty attracts you back to your desk, why not? back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford