There is gold in those Hills

I am such a dork (that is what my wife tells me).  She also says I act like an 80 year old man (who wears sperry shoes under the age of 50).  So my wife bought me a metal detector about 5 years ago.  I had begged her to get me one as a gift and on one special christmast she bought me one.  Since then I have actually gone out once to do hard core metal detecting for precious metals.  I found a dime and it took me 30 minutes to dig 8 inches.  Also it coust me 3 bucks to enter the park (I don't consider this a loss).  So I am up .10 cents with my metal detector.  I also use my metal detector around the house when I lose a nail, screw, or parts to my weed wacker.

My wife had this great idea for me to bring my metal detector out to our east Texas ranch and help her find a meteorite.  She has been looking for one now ever since she did something at her school (she is a science teacher) that showed her meteorites and talked about how one has been found in every county of Texas except the county that our ranch is.  She also knows that meteorites have some sort of space metal in them that can be registered with a metal detector.  Also you can sell meteorites you find.

With the detector in hand and some time to kill I decided to find some metal.  A little history on our small ranch.  The gentleman that we bought it from had inherited it from his father and they did not really take alot of stuff to the dump but instead they left many objects out for nature to do its thing.  We joke that if we need any sort of wood or metal to repair items around the place all we have to do is find the right junk pile.  For years now we have been slowly clearing all the basic trash off the land and now we just have the usual farm tires and wood from old barnes that are long gone now and just a few piles of varmit homes.  I put most of my bounty in piles around the place.  This is the best pile of one hubcap, a steel pole, some sort of fertilizer handle, 2 tent stakes, and a few pieces of rebar.

That hub cap might look nice all polished up and put on the wall or something.  I could start some sort of backwoods outdoor art.  I have been collecting pieces of a tractor that has been dissasembled across my place.  In 10 years or so I figure I will have the whole tractor.

Random picture above. The above picture is of the first horse that died this year on our land.  It was hit by lightning in a storm.  I have documented my wifes death collection and of course this will go into the pile of death.

Here is probably my most valuable find of the day.  That is a nice 20 foot steel chain that was in an trash fire.  I bet I could get 15 bucks at the local metal recycler.  I was at an auction that also sold old chains for around 45 bucks each but they were in better shape.

Check out the tractor weights.  This one really supprised me.  I came across the end of one of these and it was registering on my detector but I thought it was just the end of a soaker hose (we have lots of old soaker hoses on the property).  I almost didn't get it then decided I should at least put the hose in a trash pile and pulled on it and then realized it was way heavy and it was with 2 other tractor weights.  I call that a nice find!

Last, I found another part of this mystery tractor.  This is a hitch attachment for a tractor to put a ball on it and you can attach bumper pull items such as a trailer.  Say you want to do a hay ride or something.  Now the moral of this post is how I was planning on just walking around for 15 minutes and moving onto something else.  I wound up hunting for treasures for 3 hours.  I was digging and walking the whole time and had a real adventure.  Having a hobby item like this around is great for diabetes.  You can go out to a park, beach, or lake and walk for a few hours with your detector and in turn you get excersize and out of the house.  Then there is also the possibility of finding real gold or treasures.  Maybe one day my wife will find that elusive meteorite.  I do have a buddy that goes to our local lake with his detector for an hour or so and he has found all sorts of silver rings and bracelets, gold, and he even found a platnum wedding band with a 1carrat diamond in it.  He sold it for 13,000 dollars.  OK, so my 10 cents is far from his riches but I just might get all the parts to my tractor someday!