Beggared

But happy about it.

Is that a contradiction?

I had this ring:

It's a lab created sapphire, so chemically, technically, it's a real sapphire. Just, you know, nobody stole the stone from an ancient temple or shot their slave labor when they got a bad cough to bring it to the surface, you know?

I loved it. I loved it like buttah. But the underside of the band looked like this:

And it was sharp as fresh-broken glass. I could wear it, so long as I didn't put it on or take it off too often. I can't tell you how many times I managed to shave the hair off my knuckles with that thing. But I still loved it, and even though it's probably the only piece of jewelry that was worth anything, I never sold it. It's special to me.



Which is silly. It's just a pretty rock set in metal. But sentiment is what sentiment is, so I held onto it all through my 'freelance writer' years.

Still and all, I have a job now. And with a job comes a paycheck. I bethought myself, Self, I can get this fixed now and can wear it without doing myself physical harm. 

So I carried it off to my jeweler (yes, I have a jeweler -- anyone who is such a magpie as I has a jeweler) and sought remedy. Sadly, I couldn't get the band fixed, not without filling it in underneath (to the painfully high tune of $800).

I chose instead to have the stone reset into a new band.

He came home today:

It's a simple, smooth band. Way more comfortable, and the extra light around the stone is making him sparkle like a stick coated in gunpowder.



Super. Duper. Happy.