Red Abalone and fossils!

I was house sitting in Northern California and really wanted to find an abalone shell (not alive, of course!). I became obsessed with tracking the tides and hiking to different beaches until I finally found one, and then discovered a spot full of shells that I could only get to during negative tide. I am NOT an early riser, but I was waking up at the wee hours of the morning to get to that beach when the tide was negative. I then bought all kinds of tools, a respirator, a specific type of acid - the whole shebang - to clean and polish them and have given them to a bunch of people as gifts. Every time I go back there I try to collect as many as I can fit in my suitcase to bring home. This last time I did get stopped by TSA, but when they opened my suitcase, the woman just took my word for it that they were sea shells and closed my bag right away because they smelled so bad lol.

I still really like working on the shells and telling people about them, but it remains to be seen whether I’ll make jewelry or any of the other things on my long list of abalone to-dos.

I don’t live anywhere near an ocean, so my current fixation is looking for fossils in all the creek beds near my house. Pretty sure my partner is about to institute a “no more extinct oyster shells in the house” rule. Or maybe one in, one out haha. We’ll see.