Prez Says...

by Kenny Reynolds, MSDC President

Andrea Lubawy, MSDC member, Kenny Reynolds MSDC President, his wife, Heather, and grandson Aiden.

Hello MSDC members and welcome to April 2024!

I hope everyone had a nice Easter holiday! Heather and I are in Florida visiting family as I write this message. The place we are staying on the Gulf Coast and is not only beautiful, but also known as a place to find megalodon shark teeth. Every year we come and I spend time looking, but haven't found any big ones yet. Who knows, maybe this will be my year!

I want to send Mike Wise a special thank you for his presentation last month on pegmatites. Mike is so knowledgeable and just a wonderful speaker to listen to!

We are such a lucky club to have people who work at the Smithsonian come and speak to our group. I really hope that one day that we will be able to return to our meeting spot in the Museum of Natural History where we hope to have a place where we can both meet in person and to continue our Zoom calls. Until then, at least we have the Zoom option and are able to continue our programs.

The smithsonite minerals used in my display.

I saw a lot of familiar faces at the Montgomery County show in March and was quite pleased with the turn out. I managed to pick up some very nice minerals, including some fantastic specimens of plumbogummite after pyromorphite from China, a wonderful Barger quarry pyrite from Lexington, Virginia, a few specimens of pyromorphite from France, and two Virginia specimens from our own past President and mineral dealer Dave Hennessey. All in all, it was a great show with some great finds!

Plumbogummite pseudomorph (ps) pyromorphite. A fine example of this exceptional powder blue plumbogummite partially to totally replacing large pyromorphite crystals.

Plumbogummite ps pyromorphite under fluorescent light.

Barger Quarry pyrite from Lexington, Virginia

Prehnite balls from the Fairfax Quarry in Centreville, VA

For me, the mineral shows are my happy place and I just can't get enough of them.

Please join us April 3rd for our monthly program when Leigh Broadhurst will give her fine presentation on serpentine. I have seen Leigh's talk before and enjoyed it so much I recommended it to Cindy Schmidtlein for our club!

Hope to see you then!