How It All Got Started - part 2

See the April 30th post for part 1.

Fast forward about 10 years since that great collection trip week and I am at a Rock and Gem show in Bloomington, Indiana. My wife of one year did not want to go with me (she later learned that was a mistake) as she wanted to visit family. At that show there was a dealer from Peru who only pieces from the Huarón mining district in Peru. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this area it has had some great specimens of Pyrite, Quartz and Sphalerite. Now he had some decent ones for sale but there was one that I just had to have. (Let’s be honest with each other we have all been there at some point.) Well while most of his pieces were sold individually this was part of a group (a drum full to be exact) of pieces. After talking (haggling) with him and not getting him to budge on separating the piece form the lot he mentioned the price he was willing take for the entire group. After digging into the barrel and verifying the quality of the lot we agreed on a price and he helped me load the barrel into my vehicle. I could hardly wait to drive the three hours back home and see what all I purchased.

Well as soon as I got home I took the barrel into a spare bedroom and began unwrapping all 180+ pieces. (I was like a kid at Christmas but I was the one who paid shelled out the money.) Later that evening my wife came home and saw the pieces spread all over the bed and room and was not as excited as I was. The second question out of her mouth was, “What are you going to do with all of these?” (The first question was “What did you do?” Followed by the comment “I should never have let you go by yourself.”) Now I had a lot of pieces to sell to recoup my money but there was a problem, they were all from the same mine. So I started selling them to friends and members of the local rock club I realized that there was no way I could sell all of them this way. So I came up with the brilliant (not to my wife) idea that I needed a bigger mix if I was going to be able to sell all the pieces I had. (I bet you can see where this is going.)

Next up jumping in with both feet and getting over my head.