Everyone is saying it again.  Very little in the way of new finds here but if you look hard enough there are a few to be found and talked about.  Last September Joe Dorris had a couple specimens of these blue colored albite variety cleavelandite available at the Denver Show. They are from the Lake Delmo area in Jefferson County, Montana.  I saw Joe early on and he had brought a few more pieces for me to look at.  I picked out five of these very unusally colored feldspar specimens and here's a picture of the best of the lot.

One person it is always worthwhile to visit is Hemant Merchant of Mineral Decor.  He almost always seems to turn up something interesting from India.  Sure enough this year he has some spherical masses of stilbite associated with cavansite from the wagholi quarry in Poona, India.  The stilbite grew on pebbles within the trap basalts and when the quarry was expanded through dyanamite the stilbite was blown off. They look like little bubbles and the vast majority were devoid of any other mineral associations. However,an interesting association is the bow ties of cavansite. Almost uniformly the cavansite formed that way. Occasional single crystals and spherical masses were also found.  I was happy to pick out seven pieces from his selection.

7 x 5.3 cm specimen of the stilbite with cavansite.

A picture of Dr. Merchant writing up my invoice.

The dinosaurs are all over the Inn Suites again this year. Downtown Tucson is in the background.

More of the beasts in the sand volley ball court.

I have been prepping for the coming two day show that Steve Perry, Brett Keller and I will be hosting at my Tucson house on February 4 and 5.  If you are in town visit the link and come on by.  Brett Keller will be pouring samples of his award winning wines that he produces in the Mother Lode region of California's gold country.

Overall it has been a slow start to the show this year but we're still just at the front end of it all.