We usually know them the moment they walk in the door.

Their shoulders stoop ever so slightly, their gait is unnatural, often ashamed.

Some have forced cheery smiles on their faces, others have a defiant stance, ready to spar. But they all seem to have the same air about them- they’ve fallen on harder times, and they are in need of money.

They come to sell us their gold.

Every day we see them now, with the downturn in the economy and the steep rise in the price of gold. Every single one has a need, every one has a story;

“Need to pay my property taxes…”

“Getting divorced, need lawyer money, ring isn’t worth anything anyhow…”

...

I bought a one-size-fits-all dress once. It was humiliating, to say the least. Like many Americans, I am a big girl, but not so big that I have a hard time fitting into an airplane seat or anything. This dress had been made in India, (which should have tipped me off on the size!) carefully detailed and beaded, and then washed with a green dye and sandblasted. It was very beautiful, and I’m a sucker for green, and the booth at the art fair was closing in a matter of seconds. I whipped out my money, paid, and scooted, assuming that it would fit.

It didn’t.

Not wanting to accept defeat, I struggled in vain to fit the thing around my hips, but succeeded only in a renewed diet resolution (hasn’t ...

For those of you who are a little more than curious, I have posted a safe early beta of the site now online. The features set is small currently, but won’t change. I am adding purchasing, etc as we go here. You can currently browse some of our inventory and make a wishlist. Enjoy!

Wexford Jewelers

Update: Well it’s been a rough start, and there are a few navigation bugs still. But all in all I think this launch is going pretty well. I’ve added permalinks and digg / reddit / stumbleupon / del.icio.us buttons to help some of you navigate directly to an item better. I will be putting another post up soon announcing w ...

What does staying up until 4 am accomplish?

• Extreme tiredness
• Pity from your wife
• and; A nearly completed Jewelry website!

Yep, we’re almost there! I’m hoping to post a browse only version today so everyone can start looking through our inventory. This is a bare bones system at this point, but it’s getting there. I’m going to be integrating the blog post into it today or tomorrow, turning on the shopping cart tomorrow or tuesday, and working on the comment/rating system this week. Hopefull ...

The year is 1,200 BC. A man sweats in front of a furnace, a huge pair of bellows resting in his scarred hands. Beside him is a scorched earthen bowl packed hard with sand. He has spent hours shaping a plug of beeswax into an intricate crescent moon shape for a wealthy woman. Afterwards he tamped clean sand around the wax, delicately at first, then harder and harder as the shape became covered.

He places the bowl into the fire, resting it against an earthen wedge so that it is tilted sideways. The heat burns his face and brings tears to his eyes, but he is used to it now. The fire wanes and the man works the bellows again, forcing oxygen into the blaze with swift and powerful strokes. The small plug of beeswax, visib ...

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 ...