Wow. Never look at your own jewellery with a high-powered jeweller's loupe. It's pretty scary. My beloved princess cut diamond has some flaws I never knew were there, yikes! There's a really noticible black (carbon) flaw on one side, and another side there's a cloudy yellowish flaw.... I mean, I knew the stone had some visible flaws (heck, the biggest of them is visible to the naked eye), but YIKES!

Mind you, the stone stone is still quite lovely and the ring is fine, and you really do have to look pretty closely to see the flaws (and know what you're looking for) and for some of them, you need a 20x jeweller's loupe, so it's okay.

Just a word of advice, I guess you could say. Never look at your own jewellery with a jeweller's loupe. There are things you probably just don't want to know (just like the knowledge that your bed is full of bed mites, your body is covered with bacteria, and your intestines are lined with e. coli, which you would die without but which can kill you if you actually were to injest it...).

A survey has found that drivers of 4x4 motor cars in London are four times as likely to drive while using a cellphone without a hands-free kit, than drivers of other motor vehicles. They are also more likely to ignore laws requiring occupants to wear a seatbelt. The survey was conducted by three researchers based at Imperial College and was designed specifically to seek out any patterns in driving habits between 4x4 owners and normal car drivers.

I'm doing a gemology course. I can feel a new passion coming on. I've always had a tendency to get really "into" stuff, and gems are really fascinating. I could see myself becoming a collector, actually.

Just what we need... another expensive hobby wherein I accumulate more and more stuff just for the sake of it...

For the longest time, I was an emerald kinda gal. Emeralds are my birthstone, but aside from that I've always loved the green stone. And, of course, green was my favorite color for ages.

And then for a while I was into amethysts. I dunno why, other than I guess I was going through a purple phase.

Now I'm kind of neutral on emeralds and I'm definitely over amethysts. I still wear both green and purple (not usually at the same time), but I just can't be bothered with the gemstones. I suppose I could order myself some amethyst beads and make some sort of beaded stuff, that might be okay, but really... eh. I've got several emerald rings in stock, set in sterling silver, and I could very easily slip one of those onto my finger and just keep it, no big deal, but I just kinda feel like I don't really need any emeralds any more.

But lately I've been really into garnets, for some reason. I never used to like them, found the color unapealing, but I've since learned that they can be a brownish red (which I'm not crazy about as colors go), but they can also be a nice blood red and they can be a really attractive purplish wine red that I really like. They're also Miranda's birthstone, but that doesn't come into play much, I don't think (I do wear a topaz ring and a garnet ring most of the time, those being Zoë's and Miranda's birthstones, but really, I just like the rings).

Anyway, for whatever reason, I seem to be craving garnets. I always look for them when I'm exploring new potential stock suppliers, and I just really seem to want to have garnets on me or around me or something. It's actually pretty weird, but it's the same thing I did with amethysts and with emeralds (not that I've owned a lot of either stone, but I have had rings set with each).

Oh, and this is a bit of an aside, but apparently garnets also come in green. Those are fairly rare, and they're known as "mint garnets". Just FYI.

I'm sure that people who are into the mystical powers of gemstones and crystals would be able to tell me something about my sudden fascination with garnets, and I'm interested in the lore and "magic" of gemstones, but really, I think it just mostly means I'm on one of my... errr.... kicks, I guess (that's normally what people call them). I get into something and then get out of it. Not always a lot of rhyme or reason, or even any reason. Sometimes the interest lasts a long time (I haven't lost interest in Tudor history yet!), sometimes it's a passing thing. Bit like romances, actually. I get all infatuated with something, learn about it, study it, am fascinated by it, etc., and then maybe I stay with it or maybe I lose interest and move on.

But for the moment, and for an indefinite period of time that could be a week or cou.d be the rest of my life, my favorite gemstone is the garnet. No reason why. I just like them now. Quit looking at me like that.

[EDIT] Okay, I'm taking a gemology course and I've just found out that garnets come in pretty much every color of the rainbow, other than blue, and there are even some garnets that do turn blue in certain kinds of artificial light! It seems that the usual red garnet is simply the most common. Wow, pretty versatile gemstone. No wonder I like them.

Happy winter solstice. Yes, winter. I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, remember? And if you're in the Northern one, well, happy summer solstice. You enjoy the nice, long, hot day while I'm here freezing my well-padded backside off in Melbourne and I'll do the reverse for you in six months. That is, I'll enjoy the long, hot day and you can freeze. Not in Melbourne, of course, because then you'd be in summer, too.

Anyway.

WARNING! WARNING! Time waster (in the best possible way) and may induce considerable laughter! You'll need Quicktime and the sound on to enjoy the show with zefrank, oh, and you'll need to be someone who's not too easily offended by strong language and occasional mature themes and sexual references. (Lucky for me, I've got the sound going through a headset so I can listen all I want without the kids hearing it!)

Over the years, Mark Brown searched for Ms. Right in all the usual places: at parties, work functions and the occasional singles bar. He ended up meeting her inside a videogame.
[...]
The pair is among those who have fallen in love while playing so-called massively multiplayer online games, known as MMOGs. In them, enthusiasts spend hours killing monsters and completing quests in ever-changing virtual worlds.

(The thing that gets me is how surprised the Wall Street Journal seems to be about people meeting online, falling in love, and getting married. Hello! Where've they been for the past ten years?!)

I was the right age to be a punk. I wasn't one, but I could have been. I wondered for a long time why I hadn't gotten into it, because I do, in fact, like American punk (big fan of The Ramones, for example). But while I did occasionally wear safety pins in my ears (just because), I never turned into a punk girl, when it really would have suited me. All the rebellion and such, and my mother would have gone insane if I'd gotten a green mohawk...

I realized in later years that I didn't go for the punk culture because I wanted to be sexy and cute, and punk girls were only sexy and cute to punk boys. I wanted to be sexy and cute to a more mainstream audience (and I was, too, for a brief period of time).

Anyway, I've been very much admiring the Green Day songs I've heard from the American Idiot album. Really nice arrangements, and definitely worth listening to. I commented a couple of times that we should get the album. So Andrew got it for me for Mother's Day (for my birthday he got me Eagles Farewell I).

I'm finally really sitting down and listening to the album (okay, it's a CD, but it's still an album, dammit!). One of the songs moved me enough to post it in my recovery-related journal. A few of the lines inspired me enough to use them as a sigline on one of the boards I frequent.

This is a good album. Extremely coherent, excellent arrangements, and the drumlines in a couple of the songs really seriously rock. Very impressed. No wonder it won a Grammy Award for Rock Album of the Year.

She's a rebel,
She's a saint,
She's the salt of the earth,
And she's dangerous,
She's a rebel,
Vigilante,
Missing link on the brink,
Of destruction

A woman angry that her new puppy had died pushed her way into a dog breeder's home and repeatedly hit her on the head with the dead Chihuahua, authorities said.

(And, yes, my sometimes twisted sense of humour comes into play here, as I recall the Dr Demento classic, Dead Puppies

I have to tell you, I"m constantly amazed by the number of barely computer literate people who sell on eBay. I mean, the internet (and the computer) are your tools for your business, right? Shouldn't you know how to actually, you know, USE THEM?

Nuff said.

My Dear
Your Kind Attention
the best i found
you are the one and only
the love of your life is waiting for you
Much much happier today

Today is an anniversary for two completely different and unrelated things.

In 2000, I started keeping a weblog. This weblog. I did it manually at first, and then switched to Blogger and then to Greymatter, and then to Movable Type, which I'm still using to this day. So, six years I've been wasting time and bandwidth here (although the archives don't go back that far; I couldn't be bothered to change them all over).

The other anniversary is from 1996. It was on the sixth of June 1996 that I suddenly realized quite to my shock that I was in love with Andrew. I'd known him for a couple of years and we were friends, but it suddenly just hit me. Wham. In love. Quite shocked, I was.

I told Andrew about it, and he was... condescending. Kind, sweet, but he basically told me I'd get over it.

Two weeks or so later, it hit him, too. (Bit like the flu, when I describe it that way...)

Well, ten years later here we are. Still in love. It's not the same heart-thumping, dizzy-making stuff it used to be, but that's okay. I'd never get anything done if I was busy staring at Andrew with puppy dog eyes all the time (and we'd never get out of bed, which is probably too much information, eh?). I still have my moments when I look at him and think, "Gosh, I love him." When he catches me looking at him that way he smiles and says, "You've got it bad."

Which, of course, is exactly what I say to him when I catch him looking at me that way...

Several years ago, my first True Love™ came across my name on the net and contacted me. We're still in occasional contact now. I've seen him a couple of times on my way through Los Angeles, and if I go through L.A. again, I hope to see him again. We still shoot each other an email now and then when we've got something to share. It's a comfortable thing these days.

And, of course, everyone knows I met Andrew on the net. Nuff said about that.

There have be other people who have "reconnected" or connected with me via the net, too (you know who you are).

Well, tonight I got an email from not one but TWO friends from junior high school! We three were good friends, in a trio or in a pair (one set or the other). They arranged a surprise birthday party for me on my 14th birthday, the only surprise party I had ever and, indeed, have ever had (just thinking about that still makes me smile, after all these years).

So now we'll have lots of catching up to do. Fortunately for me, most of my life is somewhere on this domain (ha hah) and my ongoing life mostly ends up here when I can be bothered to write (apologies to regular readers for the lack of intelligent posts here; I'm lately doing eight things at once rather than just my usual five, and it's getting into winter here, which always slows me down on account of the Seasonal Affective Disorder).

Isn't the net a cool place? I love it. It's so where I belong...

I got a new recipe book, one specifically for slow cookers. I had a look through it and there was a recipe for Senate Bean Soup, so called because it's famously served in the cafeteria of the United States Senate. Traditionally, it's made with a hambone or hamhocks or similar, but this recipe uses bacon (full rashers, which is not something you find easily in the United States, with rind, which gets cooked in but taken out prior to eating).

My grandmother used to make Senate Bean Soup. She used a ham bone, usually, but was known to use ham hocks on occasion. She also didn't bother to put it through a sieve (in my case, I'm going to use a food processor) at the end, because she just couldn't be bothered. She also couldn't be bothered to take the bay leaves out, and would just say, "If you get a bay leaf, don't eat it." I eventually came to regard getting a bay leaf in my soup as good luck.

So I've got a big pot of bean soup in the slow cooker and it's starting to smell really grand. I went in and gave it a stir just now (I know, not necessary, but I like to do it now and then) and when I took the lid off the pot I just got the best whiff of bacon and onion and celery and beans... YUM.

Comfort food, for many reasons.... Mmmm.

Once we try this, I may alter the recipe a little (because I do that frequently with new recipes) and then I'll post it somewhere online. Recipes should be shared. Comfort food should be encouraged.

And, then, of course, there's that obligatory very old joke (which only works in an English or Australian accent).

Customer: What's the special of the day?
Waiter: It's bean soup.
Customer: I don't care what it's been, what is it now?