UPDATE - This situation has been rectified. Read here (e:paul,59749) for the updated information. Its an unbelievable store of amazing customer service.

I have been so sad since my natural sapphire from eragem cracked. I didn't expect this to ever be an issue after reading how hard they are

They are basically right behind diamond and are supposed to take all kind of heat and pressure.

I can still remember how happy I was writing to say dreams really can come true (e:paul,57440) when I got my eragem.com star sapphire wedding ring before the wedding in Summer 2013.

Sapphires aren't supposed to crack. $3500 dollars later, I find out they do when I dropped it in the shower. I was really sad. Not just because I liked the ring but because rings are supposed to be an eternal thing. Now I just have cracked stone that stresses me out every single time I look at it. Thats why I don't wear it anymore.



I know there is nothing eragem could probably do but them I wonder if the sapphire had been cracked before and filled with something. I mean it was a three foot fall? I guess the ring is heavy. Everyone seems to suggest sapphires don't crack that easy.

I wrote to eragem.com to see if they knew of anyone that could repair it or if they knew where I could get a replacement stone but never heard back ;(

Unfortunately, hunting just for the stone I found the cost of a replacement natural star sapphire is about the same as the ring itself. According to the jeweler I talked to, the ring was built around that stone and would have to be melted down and formed to accommodate a new one which would also cost a bunch. Then you have to factor in the labor. I might as well just buy a new ring.

Recently, I found what I think is a good replacement Its a Channel set diamond men's wedding band ring two-tone gold. The thing is it is also from eragem.com and its kind of hard to want to buy a ring from the same place after the last mishap but the ring is pretty nice looking and is far less likely to break. I mean you can't really crack a diamond and it is much less heavy. Then again, I thought that about the sapphire, ugh.





Here are the old rings stats for comparison. This is a real step down.

I moved the site to all SSL and then forgot to update the robots_ssl.txt file to allow google to index SSL. Oops. Now I lost a whole weeks worth of indexing ;(

I hope they come back.

My dad's Aunt, the reverend Olivia Miller was in this article in the
The Buffalo News Magazines October 30, 1983

I just converted this with OCR so it might not be perfect. Here is the page about my aunt.

Psychics
THE HOUSE looks like many others in the North Ogden-Lovejoy area of Sloan: neat flowerbeds, clean white siding, tidy sidewalks. But it's not exactly like every other house. One difference is the small metal plate on a pillar of the front porch, done in rustic lettering: "Rev. Olivia Miller/Church of the Holy Spirit/Use Side Door." Inside the side door is an expan-_ sive kitchen, but just to the rear is the church. The sanctuary contains nine small pews, each big enough for two people. At each seat is a hymnal. The walls are covered with crucifixes, paintings of biblical scenes and bells decorated with angels. In the middle of them are the Rev. Olivia Miller's framed credentials — her certificate of or-dination from Covenant Spiritual Church in Buffalo, dated 1978, and a certificate authorizing Reverend Olivia's Counseling Service to do business in the village of Sloan. "I consider myself to be a counselor becatse of the ministry, because people come to me for guidance," she says. Although her church is Christian-based, Miller says, it also teaches recognition and use of metaphysics. Her faithful (she says they number from twelve to 70 at the weekly service held on Wednesday night) deal particularly with aura reading and psychometry. Aura reading is based on the idea that each human being is sur-rounded by a halo that varies in color with his or her mood and that this halo can be seen by people who are psychically tuned in to it. "I tell people that if someone has been un-fair or mean to them, surround that person with pink universal love," Miller says. "One night a woman called me, very upset," Miller says. "She was upset at her husband, and she said it seemed like every time the family sat down to supper, a squabble would break out and they'd all end up yelling at each other. "At the time, she had a pot of stew cooking. I told her that every time she stirred that stew, she was transferring her bad energy into the stew, and that was what was dis-rupting her family. She stopped feeling upset, and her family stop-ped quarreling."
—photo by DICK MUECKL
Rev. Olivia Miller with
Miller, who lives in the same neighborhood In which she grew up and who has three adult children now, says that as a child, she "used to pick up things on people." "1 had to find out why I felt things about people. Finally, in 1970, I said, 'Hold it. I must find out who I am.' I went out to search for a medium, and I found a wonderful teacher. A lot of people want to learn why things happen in a scien-tific way. I wanted to find the spiritual way. It more or less came to me one night. I woke up saying 'Alchemy is self, alchemy is self.' I paced a long time and thought about what that could mean. And then I realized that I had done a complete about-face in my life, and I didn't feel like screaming at peo-ple any more." Miller uses "color healing" to help spiritually troubled members of her church. She has a special room set up for it and special tools. The room is furnished with a small table, a few chairs and two kneel-ers. It also has a bookshelf on
her colored stones: "Pink universal love" and hostility In the beet stew. which are boxes of colored glass "stones" as well as books. Miller says the seven colors of stones each indicate a different spiritual state of being and she can tell how a person is feeling by which color he or she chooses from a plate of stones. She also does readings, using a crystal ball which she keeps safe in a bag that in other circumstances would be used to carry a bowling ball. "I don't really read the crystal ball," she says. "But I do believe it has energies in it, and I let people feel them." Ntiller is a firm believer in the good works of her church. She says it's Important for her to be at the end of the phone In case someone in need should call and to have the church to offer her counseling. "If someone said, 'You can't have this church,' I wouldn't know what to do. I believe I'm in the right spot in my time."
HOLLY D. REMY Is an assistant editor of The Magazine.

Here is the whole article as a PDF.

::READ PDF::

it's getting ridiculous up in this dining room.

When we first got ahold of the information line and heard it was in a warehouse over on Adams st in far east side I wasn't too excited but after a taxi fiasco we safely made it there for an evening of dancing excitement and relevry.

The venue was actually really massive with two floors of DJs that were insulated enough from each other that you couldn't hear one from the other.

Even though it was packed there was enough space to dance. We got home around 7am. I was so tired at that point.

Met a bunch of random strangers and had some of the most hillarious conversations. It was a pretty great start to 2015.

I love fried shrimp so much. Same with dandelion patties and artichoke hearts with mushrooms and cheese. The whole meal was amazing.

And its only 1:50pm.

I just realized now that the NOAA had changed the URL of their weather feed and the site had not been recording the temp with blog postings. Its back now.

We hit up funky Monkey last night after watching (e:terry) play Dragon Age Inquisition for about 15 hours. Had a big group hug out on the back patio with rat boy in the middle. I kind of wish we started the night a bit earlier.

This game is awesome. Its so hard to really describe how great it looks in VR.