[meteorite-list] Of Job, Careers, and Meteorites

From: Walter Branch <branchw_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:21:05 2004
Message-ID: <006001c34bf0$d81e3b40$d8c59f44_at_b4b9e1>

Hello Everyone,

Today was a very unusual day for me. It was the last day of my job for the
past 10 years.

As some of you know, I am a psychologist who has been in private practice
for the past 10 years. Today was my last day. I have become increasingly
aggravated with insurance companies and forms, and paperwork, and managed
care people telling me what I can and can't do. Recently, when an
opportunity came up for me to become a school psychologist in the local
school system, I decided to quite my practice and change careers. It is a
little scary but exciting at the same time. No more 12 hour days or being
the last parent to pick his child up from school/day care. Of course, the
downside is, the teachers salary pay scale is not the most generous but then
life is sometimes a series of tradeoffs, is it not?

So what relevance is this to meteorites. Now that I will (hopefully) have
more time, I plan to do more with meteorites, particularly the commercial
side. I have bought and sold meteorites since I first became involved with
meteorites in 1996, when NASA announced ALH84001. My first love was
micromounts and I have decided to pursue acquiring more for my own
collection and preparing micromounts for sale. I am currently processing or
have processed about 20 different locations, finds and falls, which will be
listed at my website soon and my plan is to add more, much more, over time.

For those of you who keep track of such things, I also have a new mailing
address. It is:

Walter Branch
PO Box 60492
Savannah, GA 31420

With regard to my website, I also plan to offer collecting supplies for
micromount collectors including specimen boxes and display cases. These will
appear at my site as soon as I can get the HTML pages up.

I will also have some larger specimens for sale and I plan to build up an
inventory of those as well as the micromounts but my first priority will be
micromounts. My plan, regardless of the size (micromount/non-micromount) is
to offer good, quality material at fair prices. I plan to offer common
chondrites as well as rare material. I will not promise to have a lot of any
given fall or find (quantity) but what I will offer will be above average in
quality (or else I will say why not) and below average in price. I am also
not promising to have the lowest prices on everything but my recent
offerings of Tagish Lake and NWA 482 will be examples.

I have on order, or have already received, new equipment including scales,
saw, and other supplies. If it sounds as though I am "gearing up," well, I
am!

I am also establishing a mailing list for customers. If you want to be on my
list, simply email with your request. Subscribers to my email list will
receive notices of new material as soon as it is ready for sale or special
discounts, or both! I had such a list in the past, and sometimes new
material would sell out in a day, and non-subscribers would never in know
about the new material and it would never appear on my site. The names of my
email list subscribers will be kept anonymous and I will share my list with
no one so don't worry about excessive spam.

Now, if you have read this far I congratulate you and you deserve a special
reward. Everyone who has signed up for my email list by the end of this week
can expect to receive a special "first offer" sometime this weekend.

Thanks very much for your patience in reading through this admittedly long
email.

Best wishes,

-Walter
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www.branchmeteorites.com
Received on Wed 16 Jul 2003 07:20:28 PM PDT