Phase Two

I had an allergic reaction to something in a student's home last week - mold, I think - and have been recovering from the experience since (and am making them come to my office!).  Somehow I also kept hunting (pics later) and making inroads on my ToDo list, taught a 12-1/2 hour day Sunday (dead, Monday), and set up enough tutorials to guarantee comfortable bill-paying for the rest of the year.

Which started me thinking ...

We paid off the consumer debt a whole season ago, freeing up over $1K a month - which was good because students weren't exactly breaking down my door back then.  Now that they're lined up like dominoes, with the increased income to match, we're still spending that extra cash.  We've travelled some, we've splurged more, and we've been eating way too well (at least that's what my scale tells me).

Not stellar use of our resources, but I'm not sure it's all bad.  Maybe I needed it to balance my grief, maybe the Big Lug needed it to blow off a very stressful time at work, or maybe we've just been in transistion from one point of our lives to the next.  I don't know.  But we needed it.  Then.

Now?  It's time to get back to business.

I made only one New Year's Resolution this Labor Day:  Finish what I've started.  Even I didn't realize what a Big One it was at the time.  Yesterday, when I looked around at the dozens of things I've begun - in the last year alone! - it almost made me bawl like a little girl and run for cover, but I'm made of sterner stuff (a whimper, maybe two ... with my head buried under a pillow ...) and I banished OstrichBunny without too much argument.  I'm ready to get back to road rash and reckonings and reconstructions, to money-as-scorecard and ethics-as-boundaries and retirement-as-goalpost, to puzzling and learning and laughing as much with my successes as with my setbacks.  I'm ready to play on a whole new level.

Let the Game (point-two) begin.

Beat the Clock

I don't know how it happened - again! - but I'm pressed for time.  I might have to switch back to Mondays, even though I (rightfully) call them "Dead Mondays."  One of these days I'll be able to balance my reponsibilities and commitments with what I want to do ...

Which, of course, is to hit as many yard sales, thrift stores, pawn shops, and flea markets as is earthly possible!  Why?

First, Alaska loot.  Gorgeous, yes?  Sterling earrings, lapel pin, and charm, gold rings, earrings, and service pins, as well as a very interesting necklace - onyx and hematite (I think) with gold clasp and beads.  My favorite pieces are the leftmost ring (one of two fused wedding sets) and the amazing freshwater pearl earrings.  The cruise ship pins, too.  And the sterling things.  Of course, the heavy rock necklace is ...

Okay, so there's all sorts of things to love here.  I spent more than I wanted, but I didn't photo everything.  I couldn't, since I did it today.  I had more stuff from Alaska - earrings, a slider, an 18K ring with the stones cut out - but I "spent" them over the weekend.

Sometimes it's not simply about hunting, but about horse trading, wheeler-dealer-ing, swapping.  And in this case ...

... I made some great deals.  No, not all of this - but the service pins in front, yep.  All of them.  Mostly 14K, two diamonds, several rubies and seed pearls ... fantastic additions to my growing collection.  Can you see the "V" pin (worn by WWII moms, this one had three boys in service) and the Rotary pin (most are just metal, 14K is rare) and the Texaco and Pet pins?  Even fun research ahead - the EASM thing and the frat pins (see the one with the skull?!) were born to be with me!

The rest of the pictured items are things I've found since I returned home.  I don't think I paid more than $4 for any one of them except maybe the bracelet (questionable marking but I bought it for the opals).  I still have to do tests - I found two of the three pairs of hoops just yesterday in the dollar bin at a local thrift - but, since I only hit shops on the way to or from my tutorials and classes, I'm not wasting gas.  So they're really bargains.

Don't know what I'll do with it all yet, but I'm enthralled with my DragonBunny hoarde, and I'm wearing my favorite fused set even as I type.  'Tis the season (Fall) for fantastic Finds since, as days get shorter and the end-of-year Tax Deduction clock runs down, more and more fantastic goods make their way into stores all over the country.  You never know what you can find out there, so keep an eagle eye out!

I sure am!

National Treasure



What's so small that it has only one Representative, yet so big that every person in it has nearly one square mile all to him- (or her-) self?

Duh!

I grew up in one of the most beautiful, diverse states in the Union (California).  I've lived in nearly every region of this country (West, East, South, Midwest) and in Europe.  Yet I've never had my breath stolen so many times in one week - not by scenery, at any rate.  I can't say enough about this stunning place ... so I won't even try.  I'll let just a handful of pictures do the work for me.



Both  of these pictures were either in Girdwood, AK (south of Anchorage) or close to it.  We drove down there twice, so I'm not sure.  Doesn't matter.  Even a shot out the window of the car yields this:



Yeah, out the window of the car!  Of course, if you want to stop you might find this on the side of the road.

The side of the freaking road!  This gorgeous, Tolkienesque gem had carved itself into a cliff - a strange portal to a fantasy world offered this amazing calm while just behind me cars and trucks raced their way to more "civilized" destinations.

Oh, by the way, this is just the bottom.  The top of this fairyland is even more wonderful ...



The waterfall is a trickle this time of year, but they weren't all like that.  Thunderbird Falls, for instance ...



And the cliffs along the way ...



Okay, cliffs implied.  No I don't have pictures of them, and yes, I do have a bit of a weakness - not heights but drops, thanks to a little incident in which my sister and I went about four hundred feet, really fast, straight down, luckily hitting trees all along the way.  (And who had time to take pictures when her husband decided to walk along the edge of the freaking thing the whole way back just to punish her for making him hike the occasionally steep trail to get to see Thunderbird Falls?)

The icing on the cake, though, was the glacier ...

I've never seen anything like it ... ever.  We even got up close and personal.



This was about 350 feet away.  See the icebergs?  Glaciers do something called "calving," which is just a fancy way of saying "a piece cracks off and falls into the water," causing those icebergs.  Apparently, the average calves seen in the eight or ten tours they do a day here is one every other day.  We saw it calve twice in our single cruise - and I was so stunned both times I didn't even get a shot!

Yes, I panned for gold, too, and yes, I found gold in shops, but this ... this is more awesome and more important than anything I can buy.  This is the kind of treasure we can all find.  And it's only a plane ride away.

Okay, a very loooonnnnnnggggg plane ride away.

But it's worth it.

Holding Pattern

We got back Thursday, middday.  And since you can't leave Anchorage during the day (unless you're going somewhere else in Alaska), it was an overnight flight followed by a layover in Houston followed by the last leg.  I didn't sleep more than an hour, and that in 15 and 20 minute pieces, during any of that time.  I've learned that the easiest way to acclimate to a new west-to-east time zone is to stay awake until dark, so once home I ate some soup (only thing my stomach would take) and parked in front of the TV for some TiVo catch-up - migraine and all.

I made it to 5 p.m. before I went down like the Titanic.

Next morning at 8 a.m. I woke, feeling that fuzzy, stiff, head-banging barf-fest that only a fifth of Scotch or a trains-and-planes all-nighter can produce.  Took me all day Friday to lose the worst of it - since Saturday was the monthly flea market I really wanted to lose all of it, but I settled (for no real reason, as it turned out, because Labor Day is not a good day for that market).  By Sunday, when I had students crammed in like sardines in a can, I had something approaching a brain (thank the gods and little fishes) but the truth is, I'm still not back to normal.

It's not surprising, then, that when my camera's memory card wanted me to reformat it before I could download the pictures to my computer, no matter which computer or what trick I tried, I pretty much hit the wall.  I'm even afraid to photograph my finds (and there are plenty) with a different card for fear that it will have the same nervous breakdown.

So until the Big Lug figures it all out, I'm in Limbo, waiting patiently (now that my psychic knuckles are bruised) for the snafus to level out.  I will catch up on my backlog of responsibilities, keep hunting (found a bracelet and a pair of pearl earrings already), and eventually - eventually - post pictures, of both my finds and our biggest National Treasure, but until then ...

... cue Elevator's Favorite Hits.