Friday Glow Blogging: Creamy Fluorite

This week’s glowblog entry is a creamy brown piece of fluorite from Ohio. Activated by long-wave ultraviolet light, this piece stands in contrast to the more brightly colored blue fluorite, such as what may be found in England. It’s also interesting in that Ohio and Kentucky do produce large amounts of fluorite, in the form of large, dramatic crystals, but most of it doesn’t glow. We obtained this 2″ specimen at the ‘96 Tucson Mineral Show.

This site has been upgraded from MovableType version 3.14 to 3.15. The announcement of this upgrade mentioned that it was somewhat urgent for sites to upgrade quickly to remove a fairly big security hole. Imagine my surprise when I could not find any instructions for upgrading from the prior version to the current version. The excellent (as usual) docs, which I’ve used many times in the past, explained how to upgrade from older versions of MT, but not from the prior (any of the 3.1x) versions.

Thankfully, the MT forums explained the extremely simple upgrade process. I guess this makes up for the last upgrade, which took all of about 2 minutes. (Yeah, I know, I didn’t have any directions then, either. Guess I’m just a little tired today.)

No one’s going to be surprised in July when it’s (much) hotter here in Kansas than out in California. On the other hand, no one’s complaining that it’s 64 degrees in Lindsborg at sunset, while out west, 2 hours earlier in the day, it’s only 58 degrees in Palo Alto. Also, thinking about our weather last week, I have a new understanding of the phrase “zero to sixty”.

Who am I kidding? It’s still winter here; there’s a patch of ice outside that refuses to melt, and snow is forecast for later in the week. I’m not complaining though, compared to the east coast, the weather here is just fine.

One of a few nice pieces we picked up at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show a few years ago, this is a fine specimen of crystal calcite that was originally collected in Florida. It shines with a soft blue glow when illuminated with long-wave UV lighting.

This is just a quick note to let folks know that I’ve updated my California Mudslide posting with a new aerial photo of the area. Taken by Doc, the photo shows the entire town and the hillside behind it. What happened almost appears inevitable after seeing the image of the mudslide from the air.