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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (38322)	9/20/1999 11:33:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

OK, so we have here the Stanford Shopping Center, one of the uppest upscale shopping venues in the Bay Area (and thus the planet, lolol). And anchoring one corner is this Chinese jeweler who became Our Jeweler from the git-go. He is not distinguished by the low price or wide range of his wares ... but he would sit with me for hours and pull out one unmounted stone after another and appear to delight in the presence of another who loves the stuff of which the final polished product is made. Silly me ... nine years ago opals were plentiful and of very good quality. I bought Lifemate a pendant featuring a wafer of liquid fire ... and five years later I brought back the shards for "restoration" at his hands. Now I go in and Jimmy shakes his head sadly and says "only junk". Until last weekend. "I have something ... that you would like." He goes in back while the lady he works with entertains Helen - who gravitates to the little chrome locks on the glass cases. (She laughingly explains how Jimmy would go to twenty wholesalers and come back empty because he is very particular about the minerals that end up in his store. THIS is why he is Our Jeweler.) He comes out with a woman's ring ... a simple platinum setting and fourteen little diamonds arranged around The Stone. The Stone was a fire opal cabochon, maybe eight by eleven millimeters. But while the typical opal has a "galvanized" appearance because it is made up of several to many randomly-oriented pseudocrystal domains - this one had a single HUGE liquidy domain, and it GLOWED like a bright green or blue or orange LED depending on angle. $8900 would buy it. I don't have $8900; not for a true luxury item like that. Maybe if I'd'a ridden YHOO the right way, but that is 20/20 hindsight. He had another unset cabochon of the same size and similarly vibrant color, but six-seven separate 1/8 inch domains were tiled together to make the whole.