Boston Brooks

Reina is a name that means queen in the old language and she carries herself with a regal air. She speaks only when she must, but she does things right while displaying minimal effort. Such is her grace and her consecrated beauty. Race:    High Elf Class:    Alternate Ranger Level:    3 Alignment:    Lawful Good Armour Class:    15 Initiative:   3 Speed:    30 Proficiency:    +2 Maximum Hitpoints:     25 Current:       Temporary: Passive Perception:    13 Investigation:    11 Insight:    13   Ability Score: Modifier: Saving Throw: Strength: 8 -1 +1 Dexterity: 1 8 +4 +6 Constitution: 12 +1 +1 Intelligence: 13 +1 +1 Wisdom: 1 6 +3 +3 Charisma: 10 +0 +0 Advantage against charmed condition Skills: (* -Proficiency) DEX Acrobatics +3 WIS Medicine +3 WIS An...

 My father and I just got back from a trip to Lightning Ridge to look for opals. We had a great time and we were much more successful than we have been, panning for little specks of gold. Mud collects on the bottom of the ocean, and gets compacted into rock. Then then rock cracks and water fills on those fissures. Over time silica is deposited in those fissures. The silica is commonly a greyish blue colour (potch), but sometimes comes out sparkly. This is what we call opal. Over time, through geologic processes, the mudstone is carried upward, above sea level. In Lightning Ridge they bore tunnels into the mud stone looking for opals, and the gravel they dig out is just left on the side of the road. In fact, the roads are lined with this gravel. When it rains the mudstone is washed away, leaving behind the potch and little fragments of opal that the miners missed when they dug up the gravel. Fossickers walk along the side of the road looking for the sparkly stuff.  I collected ...

 I've recently been on holiday in NSW, and my uncle gave me a pile of sapphire bearing gravel which he'd added gold to. I had lot of fun sifting through it and I'd love to go back and collect more of the stuff. I got the impression that the minerals in the gravel would glow under UV light, so I bought a UV flood light and some electronics to make a UV strobe. I could use the strobe to tell me if I'm digging in the right place. Only 1% of the bits of gravel glowed under the spotlight so that was a bust. I'm also thinking of looking for gold. I've been thinking a lot about how I could make my own metal detector. I purchased a solder-your-own metal detector kit, MDS-60, and it's not great. I could detect a 5c coin from around 5mm. It's a start, but I'd like to build a metal detector that can compete on sensitivity to small pieces of gold as an expensive unit. Here is a video of the device in action  With a bit of fine tuning I was able to achieve detect...