Karen's Garden

This week I will show various items from my home and what minerals are in them. I started looking around trying to find out what the examples of minerals I would use, and I discovered that there are SO many! Mostly everything I found has some type of mineral in it. Here are my examples. We have a lot of pencils at our house for homework, and as we learned this week pencils contain graphite. Graphite is soft and utilizes the physical property of streak to be able to write on paper. We all have batteries and toothpaste in our houses. Batteries contain Lithium, Zinc, and Manganese. Toothpaste contains, Calcite, and Limestone. Minerals in toothpaste vary based on different types of toothpaste. I knew that toothpaste had Limestone in it, so when I researched it I was able to learn more minerals that it has in it. This photo shows my Quarrz countertop, Quartz in itself is a mineral and I picked out this mineral as a countertop because of how resilient and tough it is. Y

GeoJournal Series  Introduction     Hello everyone and welcome to the new GeoJournal series that I created for my Introduction of Geology GEOL109 class. My name is Karen Blanchard and I am from Reno, Nevada. I have lived here for only three years with my husband and three small children. We bought our first home here at the beginning of Covid, and what an experience it has been. Our 1/4 acre backyard was completely empty and unfinished, so it has been fun for me to learn about the soil, rocks, minerals, and climate that I have to work with. I am taking this class as a natural science requirement for my bachelor's in Professional Studies, Human Resources, and Hospitality and Tourism Management. I thought this class would teach me a lot about the earth and give me some insight into my own landscaping projects. I would also love to learn ways that I can help preserve the natural geology around me so that future generations can also appreciate them. I grew up in McMinnville, Oregon whe