Author: Lauren Schatz

I am sure a lot of you are tired of looking at the inside of your own homes, so I invite you to take a look inside of mine. Specifically at my rock collection. It may be hard to believe but mineralogy was my first science love. When I was really little (like 4) I was obsessed with crystals and I remember having some books on crystals and minerals that had stickers and little facts. My favorite childhood board game was unironically rocky bingo. It wasn’t until I was older that I was seduced to the side of astronomy by beautiful Hubble images. I am pretty sure what sparked my interest in crystals and minerals was Sailor Moon, a cartoon charater that uses a magic crystal wand to fight. Sailor Moon was a huge part of my childhood; recently my mom found a kindergarten journal and in it I said that my new years resolution that year was to become Sailor Moon.

A lot of us know Tucson as a major center for astronomy and optics in the United States. It is also a center for gemstone enthusiasts such as myself. For about a month starting from the end of January to mid February the largest gem show on Earth takes over a good chunk of the town. Surprisingly a lot of our group has never gone! Understandably the gem show is overwhelming, but here are some tips and tricks I have picked up as a novice collector and survivor of two gem shows.

So where to start?

If you want a bunch of sparkly rocks for cheap I recommend starting off with apophyllite. Apophyllite is a crytal that usually comes from India. Typical colors are white/clear and green. This stuff looks similar to quartz and is dirt cheap. My piece of apophyllite the size of my head was $35. You can find whole flats of this crystal for around that price at the gem show.

Apophyllite, especially green apophyllite is typically found in a matrix of stilbite. It has a waxy apperance and is usually a peach or yellowish color.

You can even find apophyllite as a matrix for other crystals. One of my favorite rocks I own is this spray crystal (I don’t actually know what the crystal is), on a green apophyllite matrix. This rock is awesome and not expensive ~$30.

Another great option for beginers is calcite. Calcite geodes look very similar to quartz geodes and are typically a clean snow white color. Calcite even fluoresces a bright pink color under black light! Calcite geodes the size of your fist should be around $5, and geodes the size of your head should be around $30.

Depending on what matrix calcite is on the crystal appearance can change drastically. I have found that when on a pyrite matrix they have wafer like crystals.

They can also come in funky pyramid crystals. The most expensive calcite specimens I have seen are honey calcite crystals that can grow in these perfect spikes. They cost hundreds of dollars.

Oh what about quartz Lauren? Surely it must be cheap right? It is so common!

Well I do in fact have a large collection of quartz, an entire shelf worth with some spill over onto other shelves.

Why I don’t recommend starting with quartz/amethyst is that it is super easy to get ripped off. This is because the price for quartz has sky rocketed due to a subculture that believes crystals have magic energy chakra. Most of my quartz specimens I have aquired through a hook-up from my mineral guy. It sounds sketchy, but he is a nice old man who sells rocks at the Saint Phillips Plaza farmers market and has super reasonable prices.

For instance this big boy geode here is over $100 (wholesale price!) at the gem show. I paid half of that which is kind of ridiculous. I think he was tired of lugging heavy geodes like this around. He said it was his last one and wanted it gone. This one wieghs around 25 pounds by itself. Imagine having to carry around boxes full!

So if you do decide to shop for quartz I recommend taking your time, and comparing costs from a lot of different vendors. Pricing for minerals is arbitrary after all!

To continue with quartz/ amethyst there are a lot of really cool specimens you can collect besides giant geodes. One of my favorite purchases this year’s gem show was this amethyst growing in a flower formation.

You can also get cactus formation:

And man made formations like this quartz crystal that has a secondary crystal artificially grown on top of it:

There are many other formation types and colors too for both natural and artificial quartz.

Ok so we covered some cheap options, but what if you want to start collecting seriously? Well its not exactly rock-et science, (pun credit to Logan), but it can be confusing. Pricing for minerals is for the most part arbitrary. There are some factors that I have seen influence price. The most obvious is size. If the specimen itself is large (I have seen geodes 10 feet tall!) or the crystals themseves are large typically the price goes way up. The other factors are color, structure, clarity, and general aesthetic. These are a bit harder to figure out. What I typically do is look up a museum quality specimen that serves as a standard for comparison. For an example I will use one of my favorite minerals called vanadinite. Vanadinite is a crystal found in Morocco. It has very cool hexagonal crystals. It is also really cheap to collect. Typically when a specimen is excellent or museum quality, the price range can be in the thousands depending on the type of mineral and the size. A fist size of excellent vanadinite is around $100!

This is a very nice specimen of vanadinite. It has a cherry red color, Large and distinct crystals, with no damage to the crystals themselves. Some examples of damage are chipping or scratches on the crystals. The crystals from an excellent specimen are a solid color, so they are not see through or have any cloudiness.

Now here are my junky vanadinite crystals:

The color is off, a brown/orange color, and the crystals are super tiny. This is one of the first rocks I ever bought, and I got completely ripped off because I had no idea what vanadinite was supposed to look like, or how common it actually is. I had never seen or heard of it before!

These specimens are getting better. The top one has two colors (yellow and orange) which is neat, but it is still off color and has tiny crystals. The one on the bottom has the desired color but the aesthetics aren’t great because the crystals are small and indistinct. These are about $10 rocks compared to the $100+ of an ‘ideal’ vanadinite.

This one is getting closer. The color is almost right, but still too brown, and a little cloudy. It is a larger piece, bigger than my fist, and the crystals are a decent size. This one was about $40, still way below the ‘ideal’. If that is too much work for you, don’t spend more then $30 on a single rock you don’t know about and you can’t go too wrong.

Arizona is a great place to collect because we have a lot of unique minerals coming out of Arizona mines. The most common are azurite and malachite that both have copper in their chemical makeup. They are found in a lot of the copper mines around. Both minerals are brightly colored, making them great display rocks.

Another copper based crystal I have is atacamite which is found in the Atacama desert in Chile, where the Magellan Telescope is!

Our state mineral is wulfenite. Some of our mines in Arizona produce the ideal standard the world compares samples to. Unfortunately I don’t have any blog worthy samples of it (only really junky stuff), because even decent wulfenite is very expensive.

Lastly, Arizona is known for our petrified wood! Some of you may know that Logan and I took a trip to Petrified Forest National Park right before the coronavirus quarantine went into effect.

We learned that Arizona has a special type of petrified wood called rainbow petrified wood. The primary color is typically a beautiful red, with blacks, yellows, blues, greens, and whites mixed in. Of course I had to buy a piece in the gift shop :).

I wish I could say these are the only rocks I own, but I have many more that didn’t make an appearance in this post. Hopefully this helps you start your own collection :).

Song of the day: When I am feeling emo I like to stare at my rocks.

Let’s face it. I am bored. You are bored. We all are bored. We have been in social isolation now for over a month, and if you are like me, nice clothes, makeup, even jeans are a thing of normalcy past. Every day I have been hovering between pajamas and gym clothes.

One of the ways I have been spending my time in quarantine is watching too many YouTube videos. One of my favorite Youtubers is Jenna Marbles, who specializes in wacky crafts and activities that no one else would do because they are too much money and effort to justify the couple hours of fun you get out of them. For example in one of her videos she turns herself into a disco ball. (Although I really recommend her videos there is some swearing in them).

Some of my favorite videos she makes are about activities she comes up with to spend time with her dogs. I am currently quarantined alone with just my cat for company. Although Katniss was very happy to have me around for the first week of quarantine, the novelty of having me around all the time has worn off. Our daily routine invovles me attempting to work, and her sleeping on the couch next to me. For this blog post I am going to emulate Jenna Marbles video where she has her dogs choose her makeup for her. I thought it would be a nice change of pace to get out of gym clothes, and has the added bonus of being something I could do with my cat.

Part One: The Selection Process

I have to admit that Katniss was a good sport during the selection process. I had thought this was going to be another Easter Egg Hunt incident. What I did for most of the selection process was lay out my makeup on my coffee table, place Katniss in the middle of the makeup, and whichever one she goes to first was the product selected.

The first round was lipstick. Katniss started out strong with a bold choice of gold lipstick.

Next was highlighter. She chose a very nice shimmery champagne color.

Next was eyeshadow (yes, I know I have too much stop judging me). I decided that I would let her pick three colors. She chose Vanity, a dark purple color by Urban Decay, Venetian Red, a redish orange color by Anastasia Beverly Hills, and Fairy, a gold color also by Anastasia Beverly Hills. I was really excited for the gold color, because then I coud potentially make my gold lipstick work. The wildcard for these colors was the dark purple, because I typically don’t wear dark makeup.

It was at this point that Katniss started losing interest and I had to bring out the treats. I decided for mascara I would put a treat in front of each choice and whichever she ate first I would choose. She was very nice to me, dodging the bright blue, bubblegum pink, and false lashes choices for standard black.

Last but not least, eyeliner. I decided I would do the opposite of mascara, and whichever treat she ate last was my choice. She decided to throw me another curveball with bubblegum pink. The other choices were black, blue, and gold.

Part Two: Putting on the Makeup

First step of my ‘getting ready’ is to PAINT MY FACE GREEN. Bet you all weren’t expecting that.

Next I put on foundation, powder, bronzer, blush, highlighter the boring stuff that doesn’t deserve details or photos. Next step is eyeshadow and eyeliner. I have been seeing a makeup trend where people use colored liquid eyeliner to outline the lids of their eyes, instead of putting the eyeliner near the lash line like usual. I decided to try that out because Katniss chose a pretty wild eyeliner color. After that I put on my crazy gold lipstick to finish the look.

Part Three: Socially Distant

So now that I am all dolled up what I am going to do? I ultimately did end up wearing the makeup to team meeting. Did anyone care? Well not really. But it entertained me for a good half a day between picking the makeup with my cat, and putting it on so I count it a win.

I did get some reviews from my friends in the group.

“Are you in a music video?” -Joseph Long

“Is there a socially distant rave tonight?” -Logan Pearce

“Eurovision may be cancelled, but you’re letting it live on with that shiny makeup!” – Jennifer Lumbres

Well that was it. Thanks for getting this far reading my completely selfish and mediocre content.

Song of the day: Keep battling those quarantine demons everyone.

I don’t know about all of you, but for me all of the days have started to blur together. In the mornings I find myself thinking: what activity could I do today so that today is different from yesterday (and the day before that, and the day before that…)? Luckily for me, yesterday night I didn’t have to try as hard. What made last night different from all other nights you might ask? Yesterday my family and I celebrated Passover with a bit of a social distancing twist! For those not in the know, Passover is the most important cultural holiday for Jewish people. A key part of passover is to invite guests to your seder dinner, in particular non-Jewish friends or family who have never experienced a Passover seder before. So this year I invite you all to a small look into what Passover is, and how it is celebrated in my family.

Normally we celebrate passover at my Aunt Wendy’s house becuase she is the head of the family, (Jewish families are matriarchies). This year we celebrated over Zoom. There were about 16 of us, and a lot of the old folks had never used a video chat service before so it was a bit wild.

What is Passover? Passover is a Jewish holiday that is based on the story of the Exodus, where Moses helped free the enslaved Hebrew people in Egypt. This is the story of the ten plagues, and Moses parting the sea. The ten plagues were: water to blood, frogs (LOTS of frogs), gnats, flies, cow disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the killing of the first born child, (coronavirus got a shout out this year). The last plague is how Passover got its name. In the story the Jewish people sacrificed a lamb and painted its blood on their doorway so that the curse would know to ‘passover’ their homes. A part of the seder is expressing remorse over the Egyptian lives lost in the plagues.

To celebrate Passover you have a special dinner called the Passover seder, and read from the Haggadah which is the collection of stories and prayers particular to Passover, and is also a guide on when to present the different ceremonial foods and why.

The most famous of the passover seder foods is matzo (or matzah it is spelled a lot of different ways). The story is that when the Jewish people fled Egypt they had so little time to prepare that they didn’t have time to wait for their bread dough to rise. As they escaped in the desert, the sun baked the dough they carried into matzo. (Maybe a potential cooking experiment to try in the Tucson summer?) We eat matzo on passover to remember their flight from Eygpt.

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Also featured in the seder:

• Bitter herbs (horseradish): to remember the bitterness of slavery.
• Lamb shank: to remember the sacrificial lambs in the last plague.
• Roasted (hard boiled) egg: symbolic of the free-will festival that accompanied the lamb sacrifice.
• Haroset: (the most delicious of the seder food. It’s a bunch of chopped apples, nuts, raisins and dried fruits mixed with cinnamon and wine) . How it looks is supposed to symbolize the mortar the hewbrews had to work with in their tasks under slavery. The taste symbolizes the sweetness of freedom.

• Parsley: for gratitude of the products of the Earth (like fresh produce I guess…)
• Salt water: you dip the parsley in it and eat them together. The salt water symbolizes the tears of the enslaved people.

After you tell the story of the exodus, and go through the special seder food, Passover wraps up with a reflection on why it is important to celebrate the holiday. The leader of the seder (usually my Uncle) picks four of the young family members to read the parts of four different types of children who are asking the question of why passover is important. Three of the four are normal (the wise child, the innocent child, the child too young to ask), but the last child is a chance for the leader to throw shade at the punk kid of the family by assigning them the role of the wicked child. This year it was my brother (hehehehe). I was the innocent child 0:)

Once the seder wraps up you have a nice family dinner. Usually this is the time my Aunt busts out her famous Matzo ball soup, but sadly this year we decided it would be too much chaos to try to eat together over zoom. Shout out to Joseph and Logan for zooming with me so I didn’t have to eat my fancy dinner by myself.

Easter bonus:

Here is some wholesome content of my cat hunting for Easter eggs (kinda she was bad at it).

Hope all of you had a Happy Easter and Passover 🙂

-Lauren

Song of the day: Since I was talking about a lot of mythos today, I thought I would share my favorite song based on the myth of Medusa.

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Hello, and thanks for joining me. Today marks the end of week three of self-isolation and quarantine for a lot of us here in Tucson. Based on what I have been seeing on social media and my own personal experience, a lot of us are starting to get a bit stir crazy from staying at home everyday. The self-isolation survival advice that I have heard the most is to try and cultivate a new hobby. For me, I have started playing Stardew Valley, a farming simulator game. A lot of hobbies however, require a lot more materials then a video game, making it frustrating and expensive to start up a new one. I thought I would share one of my oldest hobbies, painting. I may be Blog Ross, but I am no Bob Ross. Regardless I will try and step you through a simple painting, and give some advice on how to start painting using cheaper materials to keep the cost down.

A lot of us are missing astronomy and the great outdoors. Today I thought it would be nice to combine the two into a simple night sky in the desert painting. To give you a preview of what we will be painting today, here is my finished result.

To start, collect your materials.

For this painting I used five colors of acrylic paint: black, white, cadmium red hue, cadmium yellow hue, and cerulean blue hue.

My favorite brand of paint is Winsor & Newton Galeria Acylic. This is found in the Level 2: Artist section in Michaels. Almost all of my canvas, paints, and brushes are from this section. I have bought from their Level 3: professional level but couldn’t see a noticeable increase in quality to justify the steep increase in price. I do see a big increase in quality from the Level 1: Academic, and the price increase isn’t much between level 1 and 2 so I do suggest investing a little if you plan to continue painting.

Brushes: I used four of my go to brushes for this painting. A medium sized brush with a rounded tip, a small brush with a clean square edge, a fan brush, and a tiny detail brush.

Other materials: palette (a plastic TV dinner tray from the dollar store is a good alternative), and some water.

I used a canvas sheet that can be bought in a pad, as a cheaper alternative to a full canvas. I taped it to a board, and then drew some reference lines. I looked up some photos of saguaros for inspiration, and based the rock features off of Javelina Rocks at Saguaro National Park East.

To start painting we work from the background to the foreground. For our base color mix a Navy/dark-purple (2 parts blue, 1 part red, and a little black). Paint onto canvas using an up and down stroke, all the way to the rocks and around the saguaro. (I didn’t go all the way because I wanted to add a sunset effect that I decided later on was unnecessary and fixed that mistake). If you accidentally get some in your saguaro or rocks it is not a problem.

Looking at long exposure photos of the night sky, we see that it is not a uniform color. To add contrast mix 2 parts blue and 1 part red. Taking the medium size brush with the rounded edge, use a dabbing brush stroke over the background color. Don’t completely cover the background.

With the leftover paint from the last step, add in a little bit of white (should be: 2 parts blue, 1 part red, a little white). Dab onto canvas again, concentrating the density to the band where you want the Milky Way to be.

To start making the Milky Way I mixed a lavender color ( 1 part white, with a little bit of equal parts blue and red). I used a back and forth brush stroke to make a line/ steak effect. You could probably continue dabbing the color on if you like that look more. Put this color over where you want the Milky Way to be. Over the lighter color you just laid down, add some darker color for the dust lanes in the Milky Way. I used dark purple (1 part red, 1 part blue, a little black), but dark blue would work too.

Now I took my smaller brush with the square edge and white paint, and added highlights and small dust clouds to my Milky Way. I used both small dabbing brush strokes, and some half-circle brush stokes. There is a bright bulge in the Milky Way that faces towards the ground. Decide where you want the bulge and concentrate more white in that area. There is a second smaller bulge on the opposite side at that location. If you go too wild with the white (like I did) go back in with your dark purple or blue and add back in some dust lanes.

Looking at photos of the Milky Way, near the bulge the color is more yellow and less white. Mix a very light yellow (1 part white, a little yellow), and add in some yellow to your light spots. I used my fine detail brush to do this. I then went back over the edges of the yellow parts I put down with some white, to blend the colors a little better. I used a dabbing brush stroke for this.

Once you are happy with how your Milky Way looks (maybe adding in more dust lanes, maybe more bright spots) its time to add stars! Mix white paint with water (something like 2 parts water, 1 part white). Mix it well so that there are no clumps, should look like milk. Take the fan brush, or any large, flat brush and using your fingers flick the hairs of the brush to create the stars. If this explanation is confusing you can find a tutorial on YouTube. Do this until you are satisfied. I found that this made a lot of really small stars, so I took my small fine detail brush and added in some larger stars concentrating them in the Milky Way. I added a lot of these white stars into the brighter areas of the Milky Way.

As we know from astronomy stars aren’t all the same color, so lets give the white stars some friends. Mix some light blue (1 part white, a little blue), and using the fine detail brush add in some blue stars. Concentrate these outside of the Milky Way. I even added 2 or 3 red stars.

At this point my painting looks like the image below. (Noticed I fixed that mistake I made earlier. Acylic is great for beginners because it is very forgiving).

Now it is time to paint in the rocks and the saguaro! Take black paint and the small brush with the clean square edge and fill in the saguaro and rocks with black. I decided to mix a little bit of blue into the black for one of the rocks, so it would look like one rock is in the foreground, and the other in the background.

Now wait for the painting to dry, then add in your signature and it is done!

And don’t forget the important last step, give the painting to a friend who is struggling with isolation :). (While maintaining proper social distancing guidelines.)

Happy painting,

Blog Ross

Here is a relaxing song to paint to for the song of the day.