YOU KNOW YOU'RE A ROCKHOUND WHEN... Collected from the rocks-and-fossils email list and Bob's Rock Shop pages by Alan Silverstein, ajs@fc.hp.com. I included only those I thought were funny enough to list, merged similar items together, and generally edited everything to my liking. Last update: May 10, 1999 Contributors included: Adam Larson, Al MacNeil, Beth Echols, Betty Commean, Bill Morgenstern, Bob Keller, C. Badeau, Candi Johnson, Chris Leger, Cindy Massmann, Cliff Vermont, Dan Imel, Daniel Garbelman, Dave Weyand, David Althausen, Deb Pearce, Dianne Karg, Frank Karnes, Hilton Freed, Jack Rowland, Jayne Jones, John Grimley, Judy Ridle, Leslie Aickin, Lloyd Duncan, Lois Splendoria, Marcia Ingham, Mark Case, Marshall Snapp, Max Hunt, Mel Albright, Melanie Hood, Pat Twiss, Patty Cascioli, Paul Gilmore, Paul Kline, Peter Brusaschi, Prudence Jackson, Richard Busch, Rik Hill, Robert Sensenstein, Rusty Etzwiler, Scott Kleine, Smitty Schmiedlin, Susan Burns, T. Bamford, Tim Comber, Timothy Huang, Timothy McShane, Eduardo Jawerbaum, Caella Stone, J. Lanese, Gene Hartstein, Tom Isenberg, Mariam Khaljani, Ron Zeilstra, John Hammack, David Kraut, Douglas Laur, Dave Watts, Martin Malahy, Kelly Watkins, and yours truly; and probably others too. Families and friends... * You get excited when you discover on a blind date that the other person also likes rock hunting. And more excited when you discover they've actually been to some of your favorite sites. (This has happened to me!) * You decide not to get married because you'd rather keep the rock. * You go to a romantic resort with your wife, and the first thing you do upon entering the hotel is open the phone book's yellow pages to rock shops. * You justify your mineral expenditures to your spouse as a sound investment for "our" future. * Your wife knows you are down in the basement sorting rocks, but she can't quite find you, nor does she remember that pretty wall down there. * You have the greatest spouse in the world, but after ten years they say, "If you bring one more rock home, you both go." * You sleep with your rock collection instead of your spouse. * You give up sex for rockhounding. * Your children have names like Rocky, Jewel, and Beryl. * Considering the purchase of a spectacular specimen at a mineral show, you wonder if all three of your kids really need to attend college. * Your family puts your birthday candles on a slab of amethyst instead of cake. * Your kids bring you a "pretty stone" they found, and you contrive to steal it. And you know you've done it. Don't lie... * Your teenager calls you an old fossil and you take it as a compliment. * When your kid leaves for college you miss them a little, but mainly you are glad to have more space to store your rough. * You have rocks where other people have pictures of their family... Even in your wallet... A thin slab of polished dino bone... * All your friends remind you that they already have enough rocks you gave them in the past and they don't need any more. * You give rocks, tumblers, or rock tools for Christmas. * You get a lump of coal in your stocking for Christmas and you're happy about it. * You send your family on ahead into McDonald's so you can check out the decorative gravel outside. * Your spouse asks how the soup tastes and you reply, "Variable color, greasy surface, low specific gravity, texture smooth with bits of ductile material." * Your husband attempts to make you a dress out of slabs. * You have trained your friends and relatives to bring rocks, minerals, and even sand home to you from their vacations. Extra credit: You convince them to collect something for you when they are on their honeymoon. * Teaching your offspring to drive, you insist on taking them to rough, remote back roads... Near rockhounding sites. At home... * The rockpile in your garage is over your head. * The decor of your house is Triassic. * All your Tupperware is filled with rocks. * You have amethyst in your aquarium. * Your otherwise-normal rock garden has a spot where you pile up rejected lapidary rocks. (Mother Nature's Little Helper, salting the site to make life more interesting for future geologists.) * You find rocks when you empty your pockets at night. * When doing the laundry, you can't hear yourself think because of the rocks that ended up in the dryer. * When watching cartoons with your children, you try to determine what type of rock was dropped on Wiley Coyote's head by the road runner. * Instead of photos, you have chisels hanging on your walls. * You spend hours and hours in the ugliest room in your house. * You notice that you are collecting raw materials to polish or tumble faster than you are in fact finding time to do polishing or tumbling, and your house is starting to fill up with raw materials, but at least you haven't gotten as carried away as some of your rockhound friends. (But it's OK, because after all, you give most of it away -- just as soon as you're done processing it.) * The plumber asks, "What are you pouring down this drain, concrete?" * You must empty the trap on your kitchen sink at least once a year to clean out the rocks and mud. * You have discovered the joys of sludge disposal. * UPS has a regular pickup and delivery schedule for your house. * You call ahead to discover whose rates are lower for small, heavy boxes: UPS or the Postal Service. (UPS is generally cheaper for 4lb and up. :-) * The bookshelves in your home hold more rocks than books; and the books that are there are about rocks. And, you use books as doorstops. * You fuss because the the light strips you installed on your bookshelves aren't full spectrum. * You offer kids a choice of candy, petrified wood, or dino bone for halloween. * You must mow your lawn with a crack hammer. * You plant flowers in your rock garden. * The local university's geology department asks permission to hold a field trip -- in your back yard. * The city sends you a letter informing you a landfill permit is required to put any more rocks in your back yard. * You're retired and still thinking of adding another room to your house. * The floor under your mineral collection collapses. * The USGS calls to tell you they've discovered a gravitational anomaly centered on your house and to ask if you might know the reason why. * A meteorite crashes through your neighbor's roof into his living room, killing his cat, terrifying his dog, narrowly missing his wife and children, and starts a fire which almost burns down his house and destroys all his furniture... And you wish it had happened to you. Traveling... * The first thing you pack for your vacation is a chisel and a hammer. * You're planning on using a pick and shovel while you're on vacation. * You describe your vacations by the rocks you brought home. * The baggage handlers at the airport know you by name and refuse to help with your luggage. * You know each state in the US by rock types alone. * You think roadcuts are built as tourist attractions. * The sign on the side of the road says "Falling Rock", and you pull over to wait. * You arrive late and lose a hotel reservation because you spent too much time collecting at roadcuts. * You give directions like, "Turn right at the green farmhouse..." * You go fishing, lose all your lures, come home with a tacklebox full of nice calcite specimens... And you're happy! * Certain lovely areas like national parks are slightly less interesting to you now because you can't take home the rocks you find there. * You have enough field experience to know that for some strange reason most rockhounds can't draw accurate maps or give coherent directions, and that if their directions are good, the site is usually worked out. * On a given Saturday when the weather is gorgeous, you find yourself more inclined to go rock hunting than peak bagging. (Or maybe that's just a sign of passing age 40?) * You are disappointed because you aren't physically capable of carrying out as much raw material from a collecting site as you would like. Extra credit: You carry at least 5 pounds of rock home, more than 10 miles, while backpacking. * At the end of a backpacking trip, your pack weighs more than it does at the beginning. * You make a backpack for your dog. * You are at a nude resort and the only place you look is at the ground. * The severe sunburn acquired on your last vacation was a one inch wide strip of skin at the gap between the tail of your shirt and the top of your pants. * You can find Quartzsite on a map in less than five seconds. * When friends say they're going to Tucson, you assume it'll be in February. * They won't give you time off from work to attend the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show and you go anyway. * This is the way you plan your holidays: First and second week of February: Tucson. Before and after that, you let your spouse decide. * You postpone your wedding to visit the Quartzite Pow Wow, and plan to honeymoon at the Tucson Show. * When someone mentions "Franklin" you think of New Jersey rather than Ben. * You think Franklin, New Jersey might be a cool place to go on a vacation. * On a trip to Europe, you're the only member of the group who spends their time looking at cathedral walls through a pocket magnifier. Shopping... * You've spent more than ten dollars on a rock. * You've spent more than ten dollars for a book about rocks. * You know the location of every rock shop within a 100 mile radius of your home. * Your local rock shops send you get well cards when you don't stop by in more than a week. * You buy muriatic acid by the gallon and you don't own a swimming pool. * You purchase things like drywall compound just to have another nice bucket to carry rocks in. * You get excited when you find a hardware store with 16 pound sledge hammers and 5 foot long pry bars. * You buy silicon carbide grit in 50lb loads and congratulate yourself for saving money. * You bought the ugliest boots available because they were waterproof. Vehicles... * You have a two car garage and your 4WD pickup has to sit in the driveway. * You can't remember the last time your car still fit in the garage. * The only reason you bought a Toyota Landcruiser is to find more rocks. * Your car appears to be going up a 30 degree grade while sitting on level ground at the side of the road. * You're on a road trip and you rent a rooftop carrier for your luggage so there's more room in the car for rocks. * Your trunk lacks a tire jack but contains a rock hammer. * Your vehicle gets much better gas mileage on the way out than on the way back. * A truck throws a rock into your windshield and you examine the rock first. * You bribe your way out of a ticket by giving the police officer a mineral specimen you just collected. On your computer... * Your PC's screen saver features pictures of rocks. * Your PC's spelling checker has a vocabulary that includes the words "polymorph" and "pseudomorph". * You put a web page about rocks on the Internet. * Your "favorites" folder in your internet browser contains only links to rockhound web pages. * You debate for months on the Internet about whether vibratory or drum tumblers are best. * You have mineralogical database software. Miscellaneous... * You still think pet rocks are a pretty neat idea. * You examine individual rocks in driveway gravel. * You go to a rock festival, and you hate music. * You never throw away a scrap from the rock saw that can still go through the tumbler. * You watch the scenery in movies instead of the actors. * You shouted "Obsidian!" to a theater full of movie-goers while watching The Shawshank Redemption. * You care more about what happened to the diamond than the people in the movie "Titanic". * Watching the movie "Armageddon", while New York is being destroyed, all you can think about is the great specimens there would be if that really happened. * You subscribe to Rock & Gem and enjoy looking at the equipment ads -- and you own several of the items pictured -- and you have strong opinions about the quality of the gear and the veracity of the ads. * You've been found guilty of trespassing on BLM land. The judge sentences you to 10 years' hard labor breaking rocks. You fall to your knees and beg him, "Please, your honor, let it be in Franklin, New Jersey!" * You don't care if you look like a weirdo standing there motionless on a busy downtown street studying an interesting limestone block in the foundation of an old building. * You cast a critical eye on others' polish jobs... How smoothly does the overhead light roll across the surface? Are those margins clean? * You impersonate a site inspector to get at new building excavations. * Your preacher gives a particularly inspirational fire and brimstone sermon, and while the rest of he congregation are contemplating the horrors of hell, you are wondering if brimstone is igneous or metamorphic. * You go through dumpsters at convenience stores looking for beer flats in which to store your mineral specimens. * You can pronounce "molybdenite" correctly on the first try. * You think you know how to pronounce "chalcedony." * You know why people lick rocks, and you know when to avoid doing so. * Someone talks about cleavage, and you don't think about women. * You've been asked to pay extra at a fee dig area because you were still there when the owner returned the next morning. * You get a four-year degree in geology so you can make yourself a better mineral collector. * You like both root beer floats and fossil wood float. * A club to which you belong uses rocks for center-pieces for the annual Christmas dinner. * Many of your friends are rockhounds, and you notice that you never miss a local club meeting even though you never intended to join in the first place. * The polished slab on your bola tie is six inches in diameter. * You're a woman who prefers rock collecting tools over jewelry, flowers, perfume... * You dive to a 17th century treasure ship and come to the surface happy with a bag full of ballast stones. * You eavesdrop everywhere in case you hear of new fossicking areas or equipment for sale. * You know what findings are for. * Your company asks you not to bring any more rocks to the office until they have time to reinforce the floor. * Local jewelry stores and libraries give out your name for information on rock clubs. * You can debate for hours on the differences between spectrolite and labradorite. * You associate the word "hard" with a value on the the Mohs scale instead of "work". * You know where Tsumeb is. * You associate the word "saw" with diamonds instead of "wood". * You begin wondering what a set of the Mineralogical Record is worth. * You own a set of well worn dental picks that have never once touched your teeth. * You ask for a "fluorite treatment" at the dentist office. * Your doctor diagnoses hardening of the arteries and you think, "Cool! Calcification!" * You vote for any politician that wants to improve the nation's infrastructures simply because it keeps limestone quarries active. * You are convinced that buried deep in some secret government archive is a document that will conclusively prove that the entire US Apollo space program was conceived and developed for the sole purpose of getting a moon rock for a certain Presidential rock collection. * You are suffering heatstroke and dying of thirst after a long day in a completely dry quarry and have just enough water left in your bottle for a good rejuvenating gulp, but instead you use it to wet down and clean your rock so you can get a nice fleeting glimpse of your fossil. * The following Edward Abbey quotation has profound meaning for you and you like sharing it with friends even though they give you odd looks: "Rock gives reality to the otherwise abstract notion of transhuman time."