It's a small world some days

Just a little anecdote about how strange life is, some days.

This morning I got online and there was some light but steady air-to-air combat over Densbruck (?) so I lifted in a Spit 9 to give it a go. I saw someone on Ch55 telling everyone from Allied Air to get in the same TS channel, so I logged out, started TS3, and reloaded the game (I can't alt+tab it or I get CTDs).

So I join the channel with Rebel357, kinshess (?), kilo14 and another guy who's voice is familiar but I don't recognize his name. He keeps mispronouncing my name as A-crower, lol. Rebel is from Alabama, and you can hear it in his accent. Kinshess is from the Netherlands (he sounds a little like Hinkle, but MUCH louder).

So I fly high cover over Bitburg and Densbruck, occasionally diving in on the 190s or 109s, but I don't accomplish much except give warnings to the guys below me, and not get shot down (this was actually a pleasant surprise, as I was attacked twice by enemy planes). While I'm motoring around, we're all chatting about things, and it turns out Rebel sells rocks to collectors and makes good money doing it. He finds out I'm from Tampa and says 'Hey they have a rare rock down there called Agatized Coral, if you happen to find any, drop me a PM, I'll cheerfully buy it off you and even pay for the shipping. It's worth a lot of money, collectors love the stuff, and it pretty much only comes from where you are in Tampa."

I've never heard of this stuff, but I write it down (I take notes like crazy, you wouldn't believe my desk). Later, I look it up online.

1. It's the State Mineral. (I had no idea we even had a state rock.)
2. Pretty much the world's supply of it comes from a stretch of beach about 5 miles from my house, that I used to play on as a kid.
3. It is valuable. A little piece about half the size of my wife's fist goes for sixty bucks online.
4. It turns out I have a chunk of it on my bookshelf, I've been using it as a bookend, because to me it was just a heavy rock with some neat little crystals in it.
5. My wife now wants to go to the beach and see if we can find a piece or two, so she can have one as as souvenir. We're going tomorrow in the morning, at low tide.

If I hadn't been online, hadn't decided to fly, and hadn't gotten into the TS3 channel and joined the group over town, I wouldn't have learned something new about a rock on my bookshelf I've had for years. Very strange.