The Dirt Is Good To Me

I can’t believe it has been this long since I posted something!

Some months ago I began a project that took my mind-time away from detecting but now I can give my beloved hobby some due time.

But it has been quite a long time. No walking around the parks in my city, no digging holes in the ground and thus grounding myself (it’s a thing, really), no breathing outside air, and no sunshine on my face.

This sad situation led my health to decline culminating on a most unfortunate heart attack. Fittingly, the cardiac event (as they called in the hospital) happened while I sat my fat ass in my office chair. But don’t be too worried for me; my doctor put it this way: “if you are going to have a heart attack, this is the kind to have”. I think he meant that there was no permanent damage so I get to live on. I think of it as a warning shot.

Now there are a bunch of pill bottles on the kitchen counter and a couple of different types of insulin in the fridge but rather than lamenting more, I want to make this a teaching moment: Go out detecting. Dig those pull tabs and count every time you go down and get up again as a life-saving activity. Walk far, swing low and slow, breath the air, feel the sun on your skin, and live a long life.

Thank you for stopping by.

P.S. I have made a date to go detecting with a young man who is really interested in enjoying this hobby of ours. Yeah!

Once more, I have to declare I am not dead.

July was a month of vacation, illness, and hellish heat.

I took the family north to South Dakota this month to visit the Black Hills, the Badlands, and to take in Mt. Rushmore. It was great and we all had a good time.

Right before we left on our trip, I developed an ear infection that didn’t completely leave me until after we returned home.

I took Maurice with me but alas! I never got a chance to use it. There was a very nice park behind our hotel with a lovely mountain stream cutting right through the middle of it but the park itself was very new and the one time I had a little time to detect, I decided to go exploring with my youngest instead.

At the Badlands, the high temps hovered in the high 70’s, pushing 80 once or twice. However, upon descending to the plains of Kansas, the temps quickly went back up to the high 90’s and low 100’s. I have wisely stayed indoors or confined our outings to the local neighborhood swimming pool. I am feeling the itch however…

We had a very striking thunderstorm last night and I hope that the ground is moist and easier to dig so I can get in a little hunting this weekend.

I hope you are all staying cool

Thank you for stopping by.

Whenever I find something cool at one of our city’s old, trashy parks, I make a note of the spot for future clean up operations. Finding a keeper, be it an old coin or a cool relic, tells me that the spot has not been properly hunted and sometimes, cleaning it up of all pulltabs, foil, and other trash results in more cool stuff. I have a number of such spots around the city.

As far as I knew, I was the only one crazy enough to do this around here. But the other day, at lunch time, I showed up to the trashy site of the day ready to remove all trash when I came upon evidence of recent metal detecting activity of the not-me kind. Whoever worked this spot before me was conscientious and properly covered all the holes. Curious, I worked the site with the Compadre and where before there were dozens of pulltab signals, now there were none. So I opened the detector all the way and went over the site again and got a couple of hits on some foil and a couple of pieces of iron but nothing else! This person cleaned the spot well. I wondered if they found something cool for all their work.

I ran out of time so I couldn’t take a deeper look with Maurice but I surely will in the near future. While I am happy that someone else is insane like me, I am now also worried that I have competition. I hope I get to meet this person.

Thanks for stopping by!

After the excessively rainy Spring we jumped straight into the high 90’s and low 100’s, making this one of the most hostile years to metal detecting thus far. It’s a good thing that I get to metal detect the beach for the first time soon, to make up for the utter lack of metal detecting time in my life. I have gone a few times at lunch time to sweat a pint. I am mostly using the Compadre because to be honest, sometimes I get tired of all the bells and whistles on my XP Deus. Hunting with the Compadre eliminates the all too annoying habit of talking myself out of digging a target. The ol’ Compadre beeps and that’s it. No depth indicator, no VDI, no nothing. Yesterday for example, I went to a site that I have hunted heavily, and got a hit-and-miss signal. Iffy as hell. The target turned out to be a jack, from the old game girls used to play, you know, one of those star looking things that was only 3 inches deep. Finding that jack with such a bad signal got me to thinking about all the odd-shaped jewelry in the ground. I can think of earrings and pendants that may be oddly shaped and which may give a choppy foil signal. I am almost 100% sure that if I had gotten this signal with Maurice, I would have left the jack in the ground. Thusly goes the Compadre. Dig it it said; and I did. I hope the next such signal will net me some yellow stuff. Meanwhile I continue to plot about a way to acquire a Blisstool v6. Then there are rumors and insinuations from XP about version 4 of the software coming out sometime in early 2016 which is so revolutionary that it requires a new coil, which I am sure will cost around $500 American. Ah the money I spend on this hobby! I continue to justify it by telling myself that I don’t drink (one or two beers a year), I don’t smoke, and I don’t patronize the girly bars. AND this hobby has been the heck of a lot cheaper than my addiction to growing vegetables. Delicious as they were, my tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers came in with a hefty price tag. So we will see. Meanwhile, stay cool. Thank you for stopping by.

Finding gold with your metal detector is not complicated.

Let me add yet another blog post about the rain to the already saturated (he he he…) metal detecting blogosphere.

Yes, I am going to blame the lack of metal detecting on the rain even though the real reason I am not metal detecting is the lack of time.

I have seen rainier Springs around here but not for a while. The ground is so wet in places that it feels as if you are walking on wet sponges. I can’t imagine what a muddy mess it would be to try to dig a hole around here.

So, I am dedicating my time to other pursuits while this deluge abates. Those who know me may or may not be aware that I am teaching myself Japanese. Interesting language I tell you, as different from English as a Garrett detector is from a frog. Yet, after all this time of learning the script (the Japanese use 4 different scripts, including our alphabet which they call ‘romaji’), learning the grammar, and trying to make sense of the cultural aspects of it, I have done very little speaking. So, I finally gave in and paid for a conversation partner online. Nowadays, via the miracle of Skype, you can find a person anywhere in the world to speak with you in their native language for a nominal fee. We live in wondrous times. I’ll just say this one more thing, learning a language and actually using it are two entirely different things, as different as a Garrett detector is…

In case you were wondering, here’s how you say ‘metal detector’ in Japanese: 金属探知機 – kinzoku tan chiki. Literally, ‘metal detection machine’.

Also, I began teaching Spanish two years ago and recently, a volunteer Sheriff officer asked that I teach him Spanish to make his patrolling more effective. The guy is already speaking (from zero to conversational) in less than 3 months. This is due to the fact that we meet every lunch hour for lessons. We manage to meet 3 or so times a week so really, he went from zero to conversational, literally, in a manner of hours. I would calculate that we have spent 40 hours learning. I say this to dispel the toxic notion that it takes years to learn a language. If you have a good teacher (humbly, I vow my head), a good method, and a real desire to learn, you will learn a language in a few months. By the way, the method I use was developed by a Jewish Pole during WWII. Not only did he develop this method but was a real pain in the ass to the Germans as a member of the French Resistance.

To top it all off, my boys are now doing baseball and golf respectively and when not doing those things, we like to go to the Y and do some weight lifting or go walk around the Arkansas river just goofing off.

So that’s the account of my time not spent metal detecting. I am still gonna blame the rain though.

Thank you for stopping by.