Ever since the pandemic started, I have been looking for ways to fill my schedule. Recently, my family has started going to Fraser River to pick agates. We rarely have the time, though, as each session takes around 6-8 hours and the areas are often combed over many times by the time we get there. In order to find agates among the ordinary rocks, one has to squat down and look at the rocks in the direction of the sun. Then, it is easy to pick out the agates since they are transparent. At the beginning, it is easy to confuse agates with ordinary quartz, but agates are much prettier and have better colors. Most of the agates my family found are around the size of an eraser, though there are some as small as a grain of sand, and some as large as a fist. While there are a variety of uses for agates, what I chose to do was to polish them with a tumbler. Currently, I’m working on polishing all the small ones to make an agate tree. In short, I think rock picking is a very interesting hobby, and I wonder if I should start a lapidary club.