Hello, reader. How are you? Do you like earth stuff? Ming and I are traveling for fun in Oregon and looked online at cheap places to visit with an EBT card. We considered the Portland Japanese gardens, the Chinese gardens I love with their amazing teahouse, maybe an art museum? Then I saw the Rice Museum of Rocks and Minerals is three bucks a person with the EBT card program. Yay!
Here are some things I learned, remembered, and experienced at the Rice Museum of Rocks and Minerals.
not in any particular order
Sometimes a fossil is made with a surprising rock like opal, which looks beautiful beyond comprehension. Here’s a picture I took of that, to help me remember.
I saw fossilized hazelnuts and fossilized dawn redwood pine cones. That was exciting.
I learned what thunder eggs are. That’s Oregon’s state rock. Thunder eggs are when there’s some rhyolite in a sphere, and there’s a little pocket which has steam? The steam makes an expansion and an empty space in the rock. Then some time later, another rock comes and fills that empty space. So there’s a weird result of a rock within a rock. They can be hella pretty and very strange. I’m very grateful I learned about them! I like them very much.
In fact, I’m thinking of changing my name to tonitruuumovum. Tonitruumovum. What do you think?
I saw a fossil of a bat skeleton. Wow, I love those.
I saw Ming’s joy of viewing trilobites, his favorite animal.
Copper is so beautiful. I took a picture of my favorite copper formation.
I learned obsidian is glass, not crystal. Crystal needs to be more organized.
I asked Ming how we’re supposed to feel, when we go into the room that has black light for glowing rocks to glow.
A worker came into the room where Ming and I were alone and asked us how we were doing and said, “Let me know if you have any questions.” It felt like a security check, but what did he think we were doing in there? Having too much fun, I guess. That’s the room where I drew the deer jaw bone. Some people left their art there, and it was fun to see others’ depictions of the same jaw bone.
I touched sandstone, marble, granite, and an iron meteorite. The sign by the meteorite said you could touch it, but not to try to lift it. Of course, how could you not try to lift it? The meteorite was very dense and heavy.
I saw yellow crystals in another rock, so the yellow crystals looked like messy teeth.
happy
I was happy to learn many things, or maybe I knew them before, and I was re-learning them. It was my first time learning them as the person I am now.
