In case anyone forgot the Merriam-Webster definition of a hobby, allow me to provide a quick refresher... a hobby is defined as an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure. With that being said, let me be very clear... I dig for me. I write for me. If you'd like to follow my adventures--regardless of how fruitful the discoveries--than I'm just tickled pink, but if you're going to be that heckler on the sidelines... then move along already. I apologize for opening on such a sour note, but I had a moment of weakness yesterday. I hate to admit this, but I actually considered...

My mother-in-law loves telling the story of "Jocelyn and the Moth." The story goes a little like this... One crisp autumn morning in 2011, our small family of three combined forces with my husband's family of four. The seven of us piled snugly into the Ford Explorer and set off on a grand leaf-peeping adventure. My brothers-in-law--both Mark and Neal--were crammed into the back. Billy and I sandwiched our little guy's carseat in the center. Julie sat shotgun. Bill drove. (This was before he lost his fight with ALS in 2013.) Given that this was early October, the leaves had yet to reach...

I am an enigma. The more I interact with experienced diggers and historians, I've begun to realize that strangers have a tendency to underestimate me. I'm underestimate-able. You aren't likely to find underestimate-able in the dictionary--however--I do like the ring of it. (Underestimate-able, adjective: a person, place, or thing that is thought to be smaller or less than it actually is.) For all intensive purposes, consider me underestimate-able. A few years ago, I embraced that perception. When I was picking for profit at yard sales and estate sales, I took full advantage of my clueless...

I vividly recall the moment when I turned in my Makro Racer for the Summer. As a matter of fact, I caught that moment on video for your viewing pleasure: [embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rLTX46_Jxg[/embedyt] I'm pretty sure I almost passed out from heat exhaustion that day, but anyone who digs with me knows that I'm a bit relentless. You haven't heard from me in a while. I've been laying low this Summer--fixing up the house, enjoying time with the kiddos, chugging through an online course, and focusing on my big-kid obligations. But the truth is, I miss sharing my relic hunting...

Even before I started metal detecting, I'd always had a weakness for old homes--the crumbling stone facades, the weathered brick, and paint-peeled clapboards. These properties--with their overgrown vegetation, collapsing outbuildings, and crooked shutters--possess some sort of decrepit beauty that I've always found to be both haunting and mesmerizing. I think sometimes we forget that these sad structures were once the pride of a family name, a booming industry, a community, or a righteous cause. Now, they stand in ruin and waste away to the tune of the passing decades... until someone like...

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...

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...

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....

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...

These past few weeks, I haven't been able to recruit any relatives to watch my kids. (For those of you who don't know, I have a eighteen-month-old daughter and a four-year-old son.) And let's face it, unless I'm plucking diamond rings off the beach or gold nuggets from the creek, I can't afford the going rate of a babysitter. Last I checked, South Central PA doesn't have very many beaches or gold deposits. So--being the compulsive digger that I am--I opted to strap the little one to my back and buy a dog harness for the other one. (Hah! Just kidding, though the thought had crossed my mind once...