Anyway, I couldn't get it fully clean that day, figuring I would take a toothbrush to it and scrub the hell out of it. I always intended to do exactly that. So it sat.
And sat.
I moved two years later.
It stayed at my mother's and sat.
I moved again, two years later.
And again a year after that.
Finally, I put it in the trunk of my saab. It was full of spiders and cobwebs.
I finally cleaned it.
THIS YEAR.
So six years later, you know how hard that river muck was to get off of it? Mr. Clean knocked it on it's rear end in 15 minutes, no toothbrushes even needed.
It's my garbage can in my craft room now (I line it, it's not grody). The one thing I never admitted when I had spent 90 minutes digging it out of the river was that its only flaw was a crack, which is why I never bothered selling it. I mean come on, 90 minutes of work and it's cracked? Now I have a good story and a good trash can.
First off, beach finds from yesterday. I hit the beach at low tide finally (those online tide charts are so handy!) and it wasn't too cold. Here is one of the best finds of the day, which was this lime green patterned piece that's now one of my new favorites. When I had first arrived at this beach (where we found 99% of the day's glass), there was this neurotic woman who was dashing all over the place picking up small bits of something and hiding it in her hand like the nearest person who might be looking for the same thing would mug her for it or something...I discovered she wasn't picking up sea glass, but rather bits of brick and shells. Seriously, this is why I take a ridiculously large bag. Anyone wants to mug me, feel free, I'll hit you with 5lbs of sea glass and then pelt you with any nearby rocks. Shows you. Anyway, Neurotic Woman and I were heading in the same direction down the beach, but then I found this! My third marble, and second from this beach! I started jumping for joy and celebrating. Well, Neurotic Woman just turned around and ran away as fast as she possibly could. This is now the second time I have managed to scare someone away from the beach just by being myself. Also in that picture is an awesome piece of sea pottery, and the back is marked Greenwood Trent. I also found my first piece of true teal, one of the hardest colors to find in the blue category. This is a lovely piece and only found at the end of the day, far far away from the other awesome finds at the same beach. Some other finds. Who's ever lost a cell phone at the beach? Well...I found it. haha. The knob is pretty cool and the other thing is bronze and copper.
All finds for the day! After a day like that it's really hard not to hop in the car and go back, especially since gas is now $1.81 (compared to $3.81 when I was going back in the spring!)
Now, new toy! I finally bought a handheld UV light to test for uranium glass (better known as Vaseline glass). My first sea glass post back in March mentions Vaseline glass because I suspected that one of the pieces I found at Charleston beach on March 7 was a piece of Vaseline glass. (Below, it's the light green piece near the center). It barely glowed at all when I held it up to my mom's blacklight lightbulb from the 70s. So...while I was disappointed, I tried to tell myself it really was there, and freaked out about it anyway. On March 10, I found a piece that I suspected glowed (below, next to the cobalt blue pieces)...
...and I found another piece on March 11 (below under the marbles)...
...but under the blacklight there was NO GLOW AT ALL. So no pictures.
I had better luck with finding glowing things while bottle digging. They showed up slightly under the light
And need I say that unscrewing a lightbulb in the dark stairwell and screwing in a blacklight which gets impossibly hot after 30 seconds is a huge pain in the behind for a glow that sucks anyway? I held off on testing this beautiful heartbreaking shard I dug in August until I got a REAL light.
So finally, after months of disappointments, I got my handheld UV light from apexminerals on Ebay. And here's the difference between a normal $5 blacklight and a UV light:
And I was in for a surprise with my sea glass collection!
The two on top, Charleston Beach finds from March 7 and March 10, and the large frosty one on the bottom was found on March 11. I also found that old clear glass that will turn lavender/purple in the sun turns light yellow under UV light, and some of my clear buttons with a quartz content turn orange. Awesome. When I get some extra time I'm going to make a video on the difference between black lights and UV "black light".
After I run all my errands today I'm going to poke through my collection of sea glass from this year and thin it out a bit and put it up for grabs on ebay (or Etsy...haven't decided). I have a few pieces of plain sea pottery/porcelain and of course many shards of beach glass that's still glassy...I'm sure there's some mosaic artists out there who'll have a field day!
Mom had the past week off, so we spent it doing lots of fun things...including our first bottle dig together since 1998. All those other times we went digging were different though...usually we would be walking through the woods and stumble upon a pile of broken bottles and pick through...but now we had a couple places to explore so we went out early.
The big Jewett City dump was the one that's been on my list since I pulled the crock out of the Moosup River, so we went there. It's been dug a million times and we didn't find anything but killer shards...so we decided to leave after a couple hours since a dig there is going to take a more concentrated effort. We did find a stick bug, which I've never seen in the wild before (science museums/pictures...but not up close & personal).
And Mom in front of a very large & hollow tree.
We drove out to Sterling for a picnic lunch and headed over to another spot that Nick told me about (Nick now lives in Beverly Hills, going to the LA Film School)...he said he and his father used to dig there when he was a kid. Well they must've found killer bottles because all we found were killer shards and a billion rocks, so actual digging with a shovel was impossible. It was a pile of glass and rocks. We left there after a couple futile hours and decided to head over to the dump I dug a couple times (and had an awesome dig with a friend back in April). When we got there, we noticed fresh POSTED signs...not like that ever really stopped me before, but the people who live across the street have posted/no parking signs all over the place too, and I don't really feel like getting arrested. Believe me, in all my years of exploring abandoned buildings with Zack and others, I've had my share of run-ins with the cops and luckily still have a squeaky clean record. This includes run-ins with security twice at Norwich State Hospital (and a high-speed car chase around the buildings...fun!)...so I figure my luck is going to run low pretty soon.
So we got coffee.
And then I remembered this tip that I got from someone on the Antique Bottle Forum who told me of a place that's in the town I live in. So what the hell, if today was going to be fruitless we may as well go explore some place new, right?
:)
So this new place has no decent parking. I couldn't pull my car completely off the road without going in a ditch, so I got as close to the ditch as possible and left half the car in the road. (Also have never been towed because of a parking error...knock on wood). Where's the dump? Mom was all gungho at this point and started digging a hole where there was no indication that there was anything there to dig. And a canning jar lid popped out of the ground. LOL.
But that was all there was to dig, so we just started walking the property. Found a dump full of plastic bags...that's NOT a good sign. Found a bunch of abandoned tractors, a plow dated 1878...these are better signs. Mom was digging test holes here and there and at this point I was just wanting some interesting pictures for the blog, so I left all the digging stuff with her and went exploring.
Found a car!
And then found 5 more!
??????
The last thing I pointed at in the last video didn't turn out to be a car after all, but a 1941 Frigidaire refrigerator. And there we found a dump. Mostly broken ball jars and metal pails...then Mom found a doll head (which I love finding doll heads in dumps, but sadly still not found a whole one myself)!!! She found some other cool stuff in the fridge, like a pale abalone shell with weird cut outs in it...the shell was in amazing condition considering that shells you find in dumps usually disintegrate in your hand, and this one didn't.
Still something was bothering me though, because the person who told me about this place said there was a turn-of-the-century dump here...and this dump was obviously a bit more recent. But now that Mom found a decent place, she didn't want to budge...and I was worried that my car would likely get towed soon. And the sun was starting to set. I figure we can almost always come back...so we started moseying on back to the car. And then we found two more dumps. One might be the previously mentioned TOC dump, but we didn't really have time to dig...though in the time we were poking around I found 41 glass canning jar lids. LOL. It was such a ridiculous pile (39 later found to be without cracks/chips) that we went a little crazy. The next dump had stuff from the 40's-60's. Something tells me we certainly haven't found everything there.
A tea tin left behind.
THE FINDS!
I piled up the lids, but all 41 are here. I haven't cleaned them yet so I'm sure as I find more broken/chipped ones that number will go down. And I did take many of the killer shards home, because I have an artsy idea in my head.
Found in Jewett City:
(The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company later became A&P, the grocery store...bit of history..)
What's this? (above & below)
PAT'D FEB. 16 97 PATENT PENDING
(Yes, this Jewett City shard was found in the town.)
Final finds, starting with Mom's doll head! (It had one complete glass eye, and the other was broken in half)
Okay....maybe I didn't go anywhere to begin with. HA. First off, my apologies for not posting anything in over a month. The post office had me running ragged (and they still do, just not as often. lol) Mom ended up in the hospital the weekend of Father's Day because she had an esophagus spasm (which has the same symptoms of a heart attack, so the hospital wanted to make sure it wasn't one). We DID go up Lantern Hill about a week later with my grandfather (see Indy in the last post!), so here's some pictures!
Resting just before the top (490 feet).
Over near the silica mine after coming down from the top, looking for quartz crystals!
Mom found a turkey buzzard feather, which made her happy :).
Strange carved stone in the woods bearing the number 3. An old railroad used to circle Lantern Hill until about WWI, so maybe this is a leftover from back then, or earlier? There are several old foundations around the base as well. BUTTONS. These buttons came from Mig, (my mom's boyfriend's mother). She's a professional seamstress but said she had no use for these buttons anymore, and some of these even belonged to her mother. I spent weeks sorting through these picking out ones I wanted to keep vs. ones I want to sell (keep an eye out on Etsy, these buttons will be making their appearance shortly!)Oh yeah, and I went digging for an hour one day. I wish it could have been longer but all I found was half a doll head and a broken vaseline glass thing (heartbreakers!). I also found a tiny Listerine bottle. FINALLY, I moved into my office area, so here's my new workspace! Yeah, it's crammed and tiny, but it will have to do. :) This is the room I do my Etsy shipping out of, but that part of the room is not so photogenic at the moment. To celebrate, I made some fruit-rollup "sushi" with home-made rice-krispy treat & gusher filling and fruit rollup. This was so much fun to make, not to mention now I know how to make my own rice-krispy treats (incredibly easy).
The following are some product photos I took for Etsy that are not just photos, but also art! How fun is that? Avocado Art Glass Fruit Bowl & Candy Dish, $25
So that's what I've been up to...busy month! I hope to post pictures of me outside the post office truck, but I actually don't have any yet. I'll be delivering my grandparent's mail tomorrow though, so they'll probably take some of me next to the truck :D.
So the flea market is done (for now) and the auction is tonight. I'm still going, since the owners of the flea market will hopefully be selling me a kicking metal detector (as long as they remember to bring it). I used to have one of those crappy Radio Shack ones that didn't even work...proof that it didn't work was scouring the soccer field in 1997 when I lost a sterling silver ring, and didn't find it...yet the ring turned up 2 months later completely unharmed, and was found on the soccer field.
Gahhh. Sold that sucker metal detector at the next yardsale. This one is going to be a bit more expensive but with metal detectors, you really do get what someone else initially paid for ;).
Anyway, I spent this week jumping through post office hoops. Because if my carpal tunnel/ulnar neuropathy history they sent me for a physical on my dime. More like 1,760 dimes. Since when did simple physicals get so expensive? I could go into the details of how lame the physical was considering what I paid, but the doctor was nice and I got my clearance that the postal nurse required.
But I'll keep jumping through those hoops because if I flub this, I'm not going to have very nice things to say about myself, and the next time I go digging for bottles I'd probably bury myself in a ditch. LOL.
Next hoop to jump through: 90-minute driving test tomorrow in New London at 9:30. I'll admit I'm pretty nervous about it, sure I consider myself a very good driver, but I'll be the first to admit my driving scares everyone in my car. Just because I know what I'm doing doesn't mean others have much faith in me ;). And so what if I hit the curb every now and then ;). I'm kidding but I'm still nervous...and now I'm sick to boot. Either allergies or a cold, but I can't taste anything or breathe through my nose.
Maybe I over-did the digging this week. There was one sunny day (Tuesday) where I checked out a possible maybe on a new place to dig, and dug for 4 hours at the place I was digging last week. I was sneezing and coughing up all kinds of dirt, so I'd imagine that's what started it. I had some finds but didn't really take many pictures... I still need to clean & photograph last week's digs & finds too.
Tuesday night we raided the neighbor's front lawn because they had a bunch of boxes of free stuff, like old 45's and toys and stuff. Mom and I tore into those 45's like no tomorrow and we scored some awesome finds, like the Safety Dance. And there was much screaming when I found my favorite 80's song (below)...a little warped, but still plays perfect!
And then once Mom and I were done sorting out the warped records, we broke into our own 45's that we probably haven't played in 8 years but it was still tons of fun :).
One day we went to the Mystic Aquarium :).
We had such a lovely day. My grandparents took me (they have a lifetime membership so we get to go for free) and the weather was perfect too. :)
Edit: I just realized the title of this post has nothing to do with it. Mainly I was going to gripe about how little I've been inspired to write or make jewelry lately but I don't feel like it. lol. I sat in the flea market from 9-4 and everything I wrote, I ended up crossing out. I have to make a zine or something. Or just catch up in my journal. I'm getting so wrapped up in the thrill of doing stuff that I'm forgetting to write it all down.
