Husband has a large project that needs a lot of aluminum. Aluminum is made from bauxite. Husband's research says bauxite is found in Arkansas, which is east of here. It is far enough away and the project needs enough aluminum that we made it a mining trip together.

I did not appreciate what Husband calls our "noninvasive gathering methods" until I saw invasive ones. Bauxite is apparently mined using "open-cut" methods, which seems to mean something called a "quarry," where the ground is dug away until what people want is found.

Husband showed me in google maps the quarry he thinks we need to visit, and what it looks like in "satellite view." Satellites are machines that fly so high up in the sky that they cannot be seen from the ground, yet they have cameras that can see the ground and make pictures. Even from so high up, the quarry looks like a large, square grey patch. Numbers on the map showed it was about a quarter-malm across.

We mine with pickaxes, going from node to node, not leaving holes. We could bring home a few hundred chunks of copper or iron ore in a day. At the quarry there were people with trucks and large machines taking many tons of stone away, sometimes in pieces and sometimes in large blocks bigger than a car.

Husband says our Eorzean gathering methods are "aetheric crystallization" -- that we are not taking things from the ground as much as we are tapping into the world's aether to produce things. What those people do at the quarry is simply digging into the world and taking it away. If that was extracting aether, I would expect that sort of damage from a primal. Indeed, standing in the middle of the quarry and looking at how dead the land was, it felt as if a primal had been there.

Husband says this is a typical method of mining in this world. I asked how it could be done without depleting the world. He said it cannot be...that the world is running out of things.

We found bauxite nodes in a part of the quarry where people were not working. We spent a lot of time gathering a lot of bauxite so that we would not need to make the trip again soon. I will be happy to not need to see the place again.