Kauai anew!: In case you are wondering....

I have some faithful readers, so to get rid of the suspense (c'mon, you know you are wondering!), I had a fall recently.

Missed that last step down, loaded down with groceries. So I plowed into the sidewalk. It wasn't pretty. And no, I won't be showing you pictures. That would be one of those to which you would remark: I'll never get that photo out of my mind! I won't do that to you.

So I haven't been swimming. No octopus photos today. I am told I have a "depression fracture" in my nose, so I've been told to not swim. Unfortunately, the E/N/T person hasn't called me back and I've heard there is a 111 day wait for appointments! eek. That is a long time not to swim. So I'm trying to discover more about this injury, which I've been told isn't very serious and I probably won't need surgery. EEK again. Hope not!

Anyway, I decided to get back into the post habit, so I have some operculum pix for you. Try to contain your enthusiasm.

I poured them out on the table in the living room. There were 1866 of them. (And that's the total of the small bottle of 'em.) The amazing thing for me is that in one afternoon on the North Shore, I picked up 366!!! Just waiting on the beach for me. I probably spent maybe 2 hours looking, so who knows how many I could have found had I really applied myself.

I call the photo on the left Asteroid. I can't imagine the force required to bash holes into these operculum. They are very solid and weighty, so it had to be something really strong.

Here they are poured out. The ones on the red fan are the shiny ones. The ones on the black thing were the bigger ones, that for some reason are NOT shiny.

You can see in the I AM photo above the Cat's Eye one, with the blue. This is apparently a business some people have. They collect the operculum they find and then sell them. Mostly for jewelry making, I think.

I like the lines and spots on them.

The twirly part on the bottom.

Some of the shiny ones.

More whirly lines.

And just in case you missed them in the original post, some shell pix with operculum in them:

The Hairy Triton shell's operculum is different: it's more brown and I think bendable. What I love about this photo is that the brown and white below the brown operculum is part of the animal.