Lessons that are worth their weight in...

I recently discovered the #steemsilvergold community and I'm absolutely captivated. This community speaks to me in a language that I haven't heard for a very long time. See I've always been into making money and creating wealth. Even as a kid I used to order Dillon Gage catalogs and dream of trading commodities and being a "big shot"...fast forward a few years and while not a big shot to many, in my own mind I was prolific. I had stumbled upon what seemed to be a proverbial gold mine(almost literally). I had somehow learned how to get a bunch of old escrap(ie computer parts) and recover and refine the gold and silver that came out of the process. I was literally making gold from stuff that people had thrown away!! I was having the time of my life, felt like a chemist and prospector all at the same time. I even paid for my wedding with gold and silver boullion that I took to the refinery for fiat, which meant my wife loved it. My secret skill soon blew up into the whole world thinking they could do it (guess what...they couldn't ) but none the less even with prices rising (people used to GIVE the stuff away) I kept on until we hit some hard times with family illness and my stash had to get used up(would do it all over again to).

Anywho on to the lesson(s) learned. I spent almost 2yrs of my life using dangerous chemicals and learning how to handle them safely, made a lot of money, even learned about the scrap jewelry game. I had taken picture after picture of beakers full of silver nitrate and auric chloride, dried and washed gold powder and badass little nuggets....ON MY PHONE. Time rolled on as time does and I had to get a new phone. Like a dumb dumb I never backed up any of my pics so they're all lost to time sans my memory. So the lesson here is if you take a lot of photos on your phone to chromicle your life BACK THEM UP!!! The other lesson is your memories can't be stolen so even IF you lose a bunch of pictures, your mind still has you covered.

Now for the good news!! The #steemsilvergold community has rekindled my refiners spirit and I will finally be processing the 30lb box of escrap that I've been holding on to for several yrs. The other piece of good news (at least for me lol) is that I did find the pictures of my first good clean gold and the button that I melted it down into...talk about motivation to get back at it. Without further adieu I present my first gold powder (the button is the tag image). This was 3.6g of .997 gold that I recovered and refined myself from some old Pentium 1 processors...OH THE MEMORIES!!

As always, if you've made it this far (in this blog post or in life) you're awesome...stay that way.