Infrequent are the days when you head out to take on the world and find that, by some amazing coincidence and deviation from the norm, someone or something has just made whatever your goal is that day that much easier for you. It's finding that one item you've been scouring every hardware store for in the "reduced to clear" section at the supermarket where you weren't expecting it to be, or the excited quip by a good friend who is "going that way that very same day" anyways, and can give you a ride when you were planning on driving 3 hours by yourself. Occasionally this good fortune manifests itself while out insulator-digging.

When I went for a walk to check out a local housing development site along a long-abandoned rail line I wasn't expecting to find much. I usually don't, but this just happened to be one of those days where someone had done the work for me. About half an hour into the walk, while I'd been carefully scouring the ground for even the tiniest glint of glass, I raised the horizons of my sights for just long enough to see a glaring chunk of glass instead. There it was just laying atop a pile of dirt. No construction worker had thought it was a neat enough door stop to bring it home. No dog-walker had spotted it and decided it would fetch him a slick $5.00 at his next yard sale (I saw a lot of these even while I walked about in the area). The backhoe operator hadn't just churned the soil over on top of it again so as to not need to clean up any more refuse. Nope - it was laying there in plain sight as it probably had been for well over a week by the looks of the rain-beaten soil and incipient growth of vegetation around it. Amazing.

So, I took some photos and picked it up. Amazingly, I found it to be in almost perfectly mint condition, with an unusually shiny, clean surface. I always love seeing these things as they lay - presumably gazed upon for the first time since some lineman terminated their employment a century ago.

[id=381766738;Here's the piece as it lay from an angle that better shows its colour].