After a nightmarish time of digging through cache, old rss feeds, and server logs, I am happy to announce that everything - minus one post - is back online. Huzzah!

Now you guys can get back to reading real post by people who write a lot better than me. I’m just the techie typing, appropriately, from my darkened office at 5 in the morning. Sleep is for people who don’t have major sites to launch.

Speaking of which, the new site is coming along fabulously! During the restore of everything, and creating a better back up system, I delved into optimizing the speed of page loading. The site can now search thr ...

We um … are alive today. I’m really sorry for the down time. I also feel the need to apologize for all the articles that are down, and to explain what’s happened.

Last night I started a backup on our server. It was an update unrelated to the blog, but on the same server. Apparently the cpu pegged and our server locked up. After hours of attempts to bring the beast back to life I had to migrate to a new one. I am currently migrating the old articles up here, as well as the rest of the data, but it may take most of the weekend to get all of that back.

I’m asking everyone to be patient. I’m taking steps to make sure that this wil not happen again. Thanks to everyone that has been v ...

Gold at nearly a thousand US dollars an ounce. Platinum over two thousand. Silver, incredibly enough, at twenty dollars an ounce.

Did we honestly think we would see these prices this early on?

The falling value of the dollar coupled with instability in the markets has set this industry on its ear. Then we add low mine production to the mixture, and suddenly a reachable commodity becomes just one more thing that’s harder for the common man to acquire. We’ve had a spike like this before, but not with such a steady upward trend. Is it going to stay this way? Who knows. I, for one, think it will.

Rather than bemoan the price- which I can do nothing about- I want to address the situation ...

A couple stands across the case before me. Simple, hardworking, salt of the earth people. The woman has just had her ring painstakingly repaired by us- worn prongs rebuilt, a missing side diamond replaced, the surface refinished. She gazes it at it in wonder,

“I’ve never seen it so bright!” She exclaims, “It must have been extra dirty. It’s as beautiful as the day we were first married!”

“So are you.” Her husband says softly behind her, barely audible.

-Cue heart melt here-

The woman blushes a bit, glances at his own matching band, and grimaces.

“Oh, honey look at yours. It’s so dirty compared to mine no ...

Child Labor laws notwithstanding, my dad made us all work in the shop from a very early age. Sometimes it was good fun- learning to melt the wax and playing with tiny Austrian Crystals were things any child would enjoy. Other times it was not so fun, but we survived.

My right ring finger, however, almost didn’t.

The year was 1991. I was thirteen, in my first semester of full homeschooling, and my dad had found a great advantage to his daughters not being away at school for 7 hours a day: he could have us help out in the store nearly full time.

I would come to work with him in the morning, my hair up in a banana comb most days. We would park in back of the little strip mall on Speedway Boulevard in ...

One of my duties entails serving the customers who walk through our door.

It was a normal day, and I was in the process of photographing rings to upload to our website. Around 11:30, a lady walks through the door, and almost instinctively, I smile and say “hello there”. As I get up from my station where my photography white box is, I notice a hand full of gold. This lady loved her jewelry, and loved to show it off as well.

Whenever someone walks through our door, we like to offer to clean their rings in our ultrasonic cleaner. Not only does it give them an excuse to walk around our cases, it gives them a sense of getting something nice even if they didn’t buy it. Like getting your car washe ...