North (or Vacation 1)
The first leg of the prospecting vacation (less prospecting, more reconnaissance, too many places to dip a pan and the daughter won't stand for it, no one would, really, it's insane, I know, I know...). Edmonton, Peace River, Grande Prairie, Grande Cache, and then a long dusty wind along the trunk roads back. It's a big country, and these places I've not been for 30 years, awed by the scale of the coal mining, the Oil and Gas development, by the sheer impossibility of prospecting a single region of it, a full 4 months of summer would only touch upon a single area, I have easily a dozen to check...
The rest of the vacation, well, short notes beneath the images...
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SD for SB...
I've always known how the real world works, I've just lived in denial. Despite my varied dating experiences, which confirmed a lot of it...
This article sums it up nicely...
Link: http://www.gq.com/story/sugar-daddies-explained?mbid=synd_digg
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The Acid Test
The jeweler was less than impressed with my diamonds. Took a look, another look through the loupe, tweezered a couple, thought they were topaz...
Tells me the thermal test (they passed) was only one, lots of stones would pass the thermal test, to be sure you needed to do the thermal and the electric, what I needed to do was immerse the stones in Hydrochloric acid, (Muriatic acid), or Hydrofluoric acid, those that didn't dissolve would be diamonds...
There's no getting hydrofluoric acid, but Muriatic Acid I picked up at Rona. Hydrofluoric acid, by the way, for those of you who watched Breaking Bad, while without a doubt the bad-ass of acids, is not quite what Walter White cracked it up to be. Yes, it'll eat through everything, but no, it's not as great as those cracked articles or TV shows would have you believe. No, it probably wouldn't have eaten through Jesse's Tub. The Muriatic acid, it cleans the stones, fizzes on the metal in the sink (there goes the damage deposit), dissolves a few pieces of limestone for the daughter's amusement, but in the end the stones are still there, Adamantine lustre and all...
While I have no doubt the jeweler was right, there's simply no easy 1-2-3 test to determine if I've found diamonds or not. The obvious diamonds, that demonstrate great crystal shape and form, those you can tell, their crystal structure, the double terminated pyramids, twinned crystals or cubes or Ballas diamonds, but these are the rare exceptions, and not the commonly found stones, and I'm back to square one, with all of the finding still ahead of me and no way to tell when I've arrived...
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