Hello from Western NY
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2020 12:49 am
Hello everyone! My name is Mark.
Back in the early 1970's when I was 8 or 10 years old, a neighbor gave me his old Erector sets. The old ones that were all metal, you know, the good Erector sets. In one of the metal boxes that housed the sets was a really old beat up microscope. One of the microscopes that had a mirror as the light source. I think I played with that old thing more than anything else I owned. I would put rocks, mud, insects. hair, anything that would fit on the stage and I could focus on. But I was growing up and lost interest in it. It probably got thrown into the trash.
Later in my 40's, I got the itch to look at the micro world. I bought a very cheap microscope that came with some premade slides. I looked at the slides, but the microscope just wasn't producing a nice view of the slides, either the slides were not prepared correctly or the glass in the microscope was really bad. So I quickly became annoyed with it and put the microscope in the closet.
I just recently retired and I was looking for hobbies to keep me occupied and I thought about microscopes. So I bought myself a Swift SW380T, some blank slides, concavity slides, and some premade slides. What a difference from that old cheap microscope that I had! Very nice images now! After hours of looking at the premade slides, I figured I would look at live things. So at 10pm, in freezing rain, I drove to a house that has a spring that empties into a large iron tub on the side of the road. So I took some water samples! I had 2 jars, so one was the spring water only and the other sample I took was from a puddle that's always there by the iron tub. I scraped up some stone and mud with the puddle water. Drove home and started looking. WOW!
Here's a little list of what I think I saw:
Diatoms. Lots of them.
Closterium
Cosmarium
Paramecium
Spirogyra
Rotifers
Planarian
And worms that looked like glass and wiggled very fast, and some insect larvae.
I think I'm hooked
Back in the early 1970's when I was 8 or 10 years old, a neighbor gave me his old Erector sets. The old ones that were all metal, you know, the good Erector sets. In one of the metal boxes that housed the sets was a really old beat up microscope. One of the microscopes that had a mirror as the light source. I think I played with that old thing more than anything else I owned. I would put rocks, mud, insects. hair, anything that would fit on the stage and I could focus on. But I was growing up and lost interest in it. It probably got thrown into the trash.
Later in my 40's, I got the itch to look at the micro world. I bought a very cheap microscope that came with some premade slides. I looked at the slides, but the microscope just wasn't producing a nice view of the slides, either the slides were not prepared correctly or the glass in the microscope was really bad. So I quickly became annoyed with it and put the microscope in the closet.
I just recently retired and I was looking for hobbies to keep me occupied and I thought about microscopes. So I bought myself a Swift SW380T, some blank slides, concavity slides, and some premade slides. What a difference from that old cheap microscope that I had! Very nice images now! After hours of looking at the premade slides, I figured I would look at live things. So at 10pm, in freezing rain, I drove to a house that has a spring that empties into a large iron tub on the side of the road. So I took some water samples! I had 2 jars, so one was the spring water only and the other sample I took was from a puddle that's always there by the iron tub. I scraped up some stone and mud with the puddle water. Drove home and started looking. WOW!
Here's a little list of what I think I saw:
Diatoms. Lots of them.
Closterium
Cosmarium
Paramecium
Spirogyra
Rotifers
Planarian
And worms that looked like glass and wiggled very fast, and some insect larvae.
I think I'm hooked
