So recently member Laurie Adams suggested a mineral of the month section where I would pick a mineral, post information about it, and allow everyone to post personal collection photos of the mineral and discuss it.  I thought it was an excellent idea and would like to begin doing this.

I didn't want to limit the mineral I picked based on something I had in my own collection for the purpose of providing my own photo (my collection is mainly only quartz).  So I decided to used a random letter generator to pick a mineral.  You can find the letter generator here:  http://www.dave-reed.com/Nifty/randSeq.html.

After a letter is generated I would then hand pick a mineral beginning with that letter.  I would need to select the mineral myself such as not to pick one that was so rare no one had ever heard of it, and certainly wouldn't have it in their personal collections.  This might be unavoidable in some cases or if this continues long enough and all common minerals have already been posted.  In that case we'll have to settle on links I provide that lead to photographs and information about it.  In fact since my collection is extremely limited (mostly quartz) I'll not be able to provide personal photos for many "mineral of the month" posts and will rely on Wikipedia or mindat.org for most of my information.  Ideally all of you will post personal collection photos of the selected mineral and have discussion about it.  If you do not have the selected mineral in your collection, then links to photographs of the mineral on the web will be excepted.  Caveat -- the link can not be directed to the sales page where it can be purchased, as it will be considered spam and removed.

I didn't want to start doing this for August since it's almost over so I'll start it next month, September.  I wanted to post this idea to prepare you and also as an invite to discuss ideas about this new objective.  Any suggestions, additions, or modifications to this plan are welcome.

I hope all of you have had a great summer -- one more month and fall is here already!!

Scott, maybe you could use varieties sometimes, particularly when it comes to quartz, such as smoky quartz, amethyst rutilated quartz, etc. Another might be beryl, where you could use the varieties, aquamarine, emerald, morganite, etc.