My New BEADs!!!

No, it is that exciting. Exciting enough for all caps and three exclamation marks, which I rarely ever do.

I gave in to the enormous pressure of a big sale from my favorite bead company and went, possibly, a little overboard. The end result was that I ended up ordering a LOT of beads and went into debt to myself. There's a spreadsheet. It's a little complicated. I still owe myself 68 bucks, so I gotta keep getting Etsy sales so I can start accumulating the money to pay for Christmas, too. ;)

 This is how excited I was when I got:

 My big box of rocks!!!

Tourmaline in multiple colors, from watermelon green to that yummy pink.

Labradorite in rounds, nuggets, drops, rondelles, and puffed ovals.

Pink Peruvian opal and yum yum yum amethyst!

Chunky rose quartz and tourmalinated quartz behind there.

Rough aquamarine, smoky lemon quartz . . . eeeeeee!

Can't get over the schiller on this sunstone. o_O Love.

Faceted and brandy citrine.

More sunstone, ametrine, and this awesome rough, pebbly peridot.

One of my favorite stones, chysoprase.

Ohmigoodness!!! I've never seen beads this big. Ever. Enormous, faceted nuggets of rainbow fluorite.

I have a cardiac quiz tomorrow. And somehow, I will study, because I am a good student. But I'll be casting frequent longing glances over at my yummy rock box while I do.

Joplin

I drove through Joplin last month on the way back from a wedding. I scribbled down some thoughts, and I just found them again tonight. Pictures are courtesy of my friend Katy, who took these pictures as we drove by.

"Piles of trash that once made up homes – furniture, clothing, the house itself. Standing trees stripped bare of leaves, patches of white where even the bark was ripped clean. Their arms, snapped to stubs, reach to the sky in silent plea for aid. A billboard is folded neatly in half like a sheet of paper instead of a tower of steel. Addresses written in spray paint shout from the remaining walls of houses, identifying the remnants. The streets are clean but lined in mounds of dirt and branches, twisted bars of metal, flakes of concrete, single cement blocks, shreds of cloth. There’s a car, windshield splintered into a spider web of cracks and hood pounded flat.

"I’m amazed at how things are so quickly converted to the all-encompassing word “rubble.” Whatever value they held, is, in an instant, obliterated. Family pictures, plasma screen televisions, heirloom dining room tables, laptops, Gucci jeans – once the tornado caught hold of them, they lost all shape, all substance, all worth. Everything is twisted and shredded and ground into a homogenous mess without use or purpose. Rubble.  It doesn’t matter what you paid for it, how many generations old it was, what it meant to you. Now, it’s nothing."

Kind of depressing, how easily things go from treasure to trash. Not to get didactic or terribly sappy, but it really did remind me to store up the kind of treasures that could make it through a tornado. Relationships are forever-kind of treasures--even if you lose the person you loved, you've got the happy times you went through. And, God willing, you haven't really lost them. Not permanently.

Hope - to believe that what's gone is not truly lost.