metal detecting

Bottle Fever

  • June 15, 2015

I'll admit that I've been on a glass kick lately. Obviously, not a single one of my detectors can find glass--but I've mastered a method for finding bottle shards and china fragments. Are you ready for this? I call it... the random-hole-digging-method. You may be asking yourself, what is this random-hole-digging-method and how can I sign up. Well, I'm about to tell you... Sometime last week, I decided to leave the detector in the trunk of my Forester. Instead, I grabbed my shovel and set off to find myself a bottle dump or privy. For those of you who follow my blog, this is the brick house...

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A Little Lead Man

  • June 4, 2015

A few days after I graduated first grade, my parents uprooted our entire family and moved us out West. I traded clam chowdAH for barbecue, rolling waves for endless plains, and soda for pop. The cultural whiplash took awhile to recover from, but once I realized ya'll was essentially the same as youz-guys--I got along just fine. While living in Kansas, I remember going on lots of fields trips--this was back before schools had to worry about all that liability. Heck, all you needed was a signed permission slip and you could feed tigers at the zoo or take an inflatable raft down some wicked...

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Spoons in the Schoolyard

  • May 26, 2015

Every now and then, you knock on a stranger's door hoping to obtain a permission and you get a surprising response--sometimes its a face full of front door, sometimes its a explosion of profanity, and sometimes its the business end of a twelve gauge and a strong verbal warning to skedaddle. Then, sometimes... its a tour of the one room school house, a complete history of the area, and free rein of the hundred-and-fifty acre property. Sometime last Fall, I turned down a country road in search of a rumored property. I snaked my way through the orchards, the cornfields, and the pastures of...

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I Talk to Dead People

  • May 22, 2015

I talk to dead people. Now--hang on a second--before you call the loony bin and have me committed, you should hear me out... I talk to dead people, but the dead people don't always talk back. I mean, sometimes they do. Sometimes they give me a nudge in the right direction. Sometimes they whisper through a gust of wind. Sometimes they manifest as a crow perched in tree--constantly heckling and shouting commands. Granted, this is usually when I'm all by myself at some abandoned homestead--with no one to confirm the phenomena--but I assure you that I'm not making this stuff up. Yesterday was a horrible...

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Hound Dog of Detecting – XP Deus

  • May 14, 2015

Today I received a text from my husband: "Can we get the DeepSeeker?" Of course, he was referring to the Garrett ATX DeepSeeker Package--the one with the whopping price tag. Rather than just smack him upside the head with a reality check, I gently reminded him that we just sold a car to buy an XP Deus. I mean... technically the car had been rusting in our driveway for close to two years but I'm not about to throw the house on the market for an ATX--regardless of how much I love Garrett. Now granted, I made the mistake of spoiling him with the XP Deus for his twenty-sixth birthday. Like many hobbyists,...

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Racking up Permissions

  • May 13, 2015

No matter how you slice it, marketing has a lot to do with metal detecting. All those times you've knocked on a door, sent a letter, or called a complete stranger to get permission for a property--that IS marketing. But rather than marketing a product, you are marketing yourself. You are--essentially--selling yourself to perspective permissions. Marketing is my second nature--falling somewhere after writing and metal detecting. I've worked in marketing for the past seven years--generating leads, running campaigns, writing collateral. Once I realized that the skills I developed while working...

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Woes of the Woman Digger

  • April 27, 2015

Some women enjoy weeding their flower beds and poking around in their vegetable gardens. I prefer digging for treasure. I reap more reward from pulling a two-hundred-year-old coin from the ground than I do a carrot. Don't get me wrong, carrots are tasty and all... but can you display them in a shadow box and brag to all your facebook friends? Well... I guess that depends on your facebook friends. If I started posting carrots in the metal detecting groups, I might lose a few of those friends. I guess through writing my blog and sharing my perspective, I've sort of been launched into the spotlight....

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Metal Detecting Basics

  • April 22, 2015

This is not my typical post. This is a compilation of tips and tricks I've learned about metal detecting... with a lot of help from my readers and my detecting family along the way. My goal in writing this post is to hep beginners and perhaps teach others a thing or two as well. - The Right Machine -  The right machine is important. Whether you're just starting out or looking to upgrade, you need a metal detector with the right features. I purchased my first (ACE 250)... and second (AT Pro) metal detector through Robert Wyatt at Quality Metal Detectors. Robert goes above and beyond. I encourage...

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Second Ticket to the Underground Railroad

  • April 20, 2015

This weekend was epic--my husband hates when I use that word, but I would be robbing the experience if I used any lesser word. Allow me to begin with the story of Daniel Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman was an abolitionist icon--if you will--and those who supported slavery attempted to make an example of him in order to deter others from helping slaves find freedom. If your happen to drive through the quaint town of Boiling Springs, you will see a large brick home with a historical marker. The marker reads: "Daniel Kaufman: An Underground Railroad agent from 1835 to 1847, when he was sued by a Maryland...

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Owning It

  • April 17, 2015

The other evening, my husband and I took the munchkins to the park. A few kids were already scaling the playground equipment and digging around in the mulch. For the most part, the parents hovered nearby... but there are always exceptions. One parent dropped off his hellions and wandered across the soccer fields with his hands stuffed in his sweatshirt pockets--disappearing from view. There is nothing more infuriating than parents who abandon their misbehaving children at the playground for everyone else to deal with... especially, when those misbehaving children have a massive dump in their...

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