Stuff In Steve's Office (#2)

[sleigh]

The continuing series of “stuff in my office…”  This is what I get for cleaning up the place; all of the sudden I see things that I’ve become so used to that I stopped noticing them at all.

I have lots of rocks in my office.  Some are specimens I’ve picked up (or have been given) just because they’re pretty, but none of these belong to that category.  I’ve long had a habit of picking up a rock whenever I visit somewhere and taking it home with me.  The rock doesn’t have to be ‘pretty’ or unusual -- in fact, I prefer that it not be.  It should be common, something that looks like the place it came from.

The photograph below contains several of these. Starting with the one in the middle, then going to the plaque and continuing clockwise around the circle, they are:

--A rock from Azay le Rideau in France.  I found this one along the little road that runs in front of the gite.  Denise and I were there in 2005, and we had a wonderful time wandering the Loire valley and seeing Paris.

-- This one’s the only one I didn’t pick myself.  My father gave me this one: the plaque has a rock from the ruins of my great-grandmother’s house in Ireland (the Coen house).  Only a corner of the house remains, and this is a stone from it.  Dad got the stone on their first trip to Ireland to see relatives.  I went with them when they went back in 1999, but rather than a rock, I picked up a rusty horseshoe from the Farrell house, which is now only a shell that’s used as a barn on someone’s property.  The horseshoe now resides over the front door of our house, not in my office.

-- A rather nondescript rock, but it’s from Stonehenge.  Well, let me clarify before the British authorities come after me: it’s not actually from the ring, it’s from a field across the road from Stonehenge itself.  I was in England over the New Years break this year with my colleague Andy Miller, teaching a course on British Fantasy with twenty or so students from Kentucky and Tennessee schools.

-- This one’s also from the British Fantasy trip: it’s a cobblestone from one of the little lanes that wander through Oxford University -- from between the Bodleian Library and the Radcliffe Camera. No, I didn’t break it loose; it was already sitting there unseated.  I just picked it up…

-- The two halves of a geode I once found, ages ago.  It was just pretty; other than that, there’s no ‘memory’ significance to it.

-- This one’s from New Hampshire.  I attended the Aikido Summer Camp the year I tested for Shodan (first degree black belt).  A nice piece of granite, typical for the region. This is from the driveway outside the auditorium where the test took place.

-- This is an amethyst Denise once gave me, which came from a collection of similar rocks that her father had.  I’ve sometime thought about inserting it into a staff as a ‘wizard’s staff’ but have so far resisted the impulse.  It does remind me of Denise’s dad, though, who was a man I came to love as a second father.

-- A piece of Mont Royal in Montreal. I attended an aikido seminar there, and climbed to the top of the mountain one evening.  I also set a scene there for what would have been the second WILD CARDS series of Epic Comics, but unfortunately that project never ended up seeing the light of day.

-- One of my first acquisitions.  As a kid, I loved to collect rocks and fossils (which you can see is an impulse that has never quite left me).  I found this one on a hillside in the woods behind our houe in Reading, Ohio.  One of the better fossils I came across…

This is by no means all the rocks sitting on shelves or on top of bookcases in the office, but it’ll give you an idea of what’s around.  More pictures of Stuff In Steve’s Office to come (yes, I know -- that’s a threat).