These are big, beautiful, heavy, decadent builds! Everything about the current price of precious metals would have me NOT work this way but I do what I want and what I wanted to build this week is big, bold, everlasting ring forms. These rings are set with wonderful cuts of buttery yellow dendritic opal. This is one of my favorite stones to work with and it’s difficult to find in this hue. My pal in Boise cut these stones for me and I’m grateful to have his help when it comes to sourcing precious stones such as these. Dendritic opal reminds me of Indian summer here on the high desert when the weather is a perfect blend of cold wind and warm sun and everything turns to gold as far as the eye can see. These rings are all that, in a nutshell.

Random thinking aloud: I’ve been thinking, these past couple of weeks, about one thousand years from now when some human being discovers our farm tucked away in layers of strata and drift and makes it an archeological dig. We look at archeological sites now and we say, “Look! These people had a religion. They hunted. They grew their food. They had art and expressed themselves. They had music. They kept records.”

So, too, they’ll look at the dusty, fossilized remains of our farm and our life and they’ll say, “Look, they had hunting tools. They had farming implements. They had livestock. They had music. They had a God. They had art and craft — they worked with their hands.”

There is only time separating Robbie and I from our early ancestors and there’s something so solid feeling and human feeling about that.

What do you think an archeological dig would look like in Seattle or Los Angeles or New York City 1000 years from now? What would an archeological dig look like at your house 1000 years from now?