iiskaa: (Default)
iiskaa ([personal profile] iiskaa) wrote2012-01-05 12:44 pm
Entry tags:

Snowflake Challenge Day 5

Day 5

In your own space, share something non-fannish you are passionate about with your fannish friends.


This one was kind of hard for me, IDK. *so many non-fandom passions* I went with one I could easily produce picspam of.



Some of you on my flist probably already know this, but for those who don't, my higher education in a nutshell: first I got a degree in physics, then I got a degree in classical studies, then I went to grad school for classical studies. Then I quit grad school to study geology, which is what I'm doing now. And I love it, more than physics even, and for all that I like the languages and find it an interesting subject, I wish I could just erase the whole classical studies thing because it was a massive waste of time, I should have just stayed in the sciences.

I intend to go into hydrology, even though it's not where the big money is, because *passion*.

And being a geology major provides me with a convenient explanation for practically every flat surface in and around my house being covered in rocks. I like to hike and wander around in creek beds and things like that and I always end up carting home piles of things like this:



Shit I found in Shoal Creek. I go there pretty often because it's close to my house. What I find the most of there are Devil's Toenails (gryphaea, the things along the back), exogyra (bottom left), and waconella (bottom right). I've heard of people finding shark teeth but I've never come across one.



This is Shoal Creek. When the water is low, you can see these bits of wire sticking up all over the place with leaves and shit wrapped around them, like trash flowers. I don't know how the wire gets there, it's not rebar, it's like coat hanger wire or something.



Where the waconella come from (if you look up from the tip of my shoe to about the middle of the picture, you can see one stuck in the rock). I think usually this is under water but this summer, with the drought, a big stretch of it was exposed.



Kind of hard to make out in the picture but there are a couple cross sections of some kind of coral in this rock. You can only see any detail when it's wet. I found this one in the Colorado River just south of Town Lake.



A filled-in worm tube, maybe? This one came from Barton Creek.

Geology is my handy excuse but I've actually been collecting shit like this forever:



A handful of marble-veined pebbles I picked up off the beach of a lake in Switzerland when I was like twelve.
femme4jack: (Default)

[personal profile] femme4jack 2012-01-06 06:06 am (UTC)(link)
I would LOVE to go back to school and study geology. And my kids and I call marble-veined pebbled "wishing stones". Our rule is that if you find one, you can throw it in the water and make a wish.
hannah: (Default)

[personal profile] hannah 2012-01-06 04:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Here through the Snowflake Challenge masterpost - science is awesome, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
akamine_chan: Created by me; please don't take (Default)

[personal profile] akamine_chan 2012-01-07 08:43 am (UTC)(link)
I went the other way - fell in love with geology, spend 5 years trying to reconcile my love for the subject with a learning disability and burnout on higher education and ended up in several totally unrelated fields.

I recently packed up my life and moved across country and had to get rid of 20+ years of rocks that I'd collected, but I kept some of my favorites: a set of vertebrate claw marks in some sandstone, salt crystal casts in another sandstone, a small rugose coral, crinoid columnals, baby garnets in a silvery schist.

I get it.

[identity profile] dragondancer515.livejournal.com 2012-01-05 06:56 pm (UTC)(link)
<333 That's pretty awesome!

And yeah, can TOTES relate to the "wish I hadn't pursued that! *goes back to original or close to it*" 9,9

[identity profile] iiiskaaa.livejournal.com 2012-01-05 07:05 pm (UTC)(link)
Haha, yeah, I regret the time I wasted but it's such a relief being back in an area I actually give a shit about, and I think I appreciate it more now than I would have if I hadn't blown off those years doing something useless.

[identity profile] dragondancer515.livejournal.com 2012-01-05 07:11 pm (UTC)(link)
*nodnod* I'm fortunate that I've only blown about a year and a half myself. Definitely appreciate the accounting/bookkeeping all the more now! Though I guess we'll see if I still feel that way in a few weeks or few months, depending on how long it takes me to find work /now/. >,<;;; CAN'T be as long and frustrating as it's been with the medical billing and coding though, where I don't qualify for 90% of what's available and violently DO NOT WANT about 8% of what's left. >,>