I'm a rockhound. I search for, collect and study rocks and minerals and I've been doing this since I was a kid. It's a great hobby. It is fascinating. Rocks are amazing things and rocks have fantastic stories to tell.
Years ago, many years ago I had a neighbor who was a rockhound. Actually he was a retired geology professor from a college in New York but he'd been rock hounding for years and when he found out this kid next door liked rocks he sort of took me under his wing to teach me about them. He showed me his rocks and I enthusiastically showed him mine.
I collected rocks or pieces or rock everywhere I went and I seldom returned home without at least one rock, from tiny ones to boulders and I was determined to keep them all, quite against my parents best wishes. They didn't relate well to these "treasures" I had found.
I learned a lot about rocks while growing up, mostly from my neighbor to whom I am sure I became quite the pest. He taught me the difference between rocks and minerals, what was meant by igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic, just a stone and a gem stone, dirt, sand, fossils and a forest made of stone, the dynamics of our planet Earth and the relationship between a hunk of coal and a fine cut diamond.
He taught me the priceless value of all rock and how we could not exist without them. The more I learned the more fascinated I became.
