Diamonds and Dumpsters

Christi has a history of bad luck with expensive jewelry.  Well, with both pieces of expensive jewelry she's ever had.  And expensive is relative.  The first is her wedding ring.  The second is a reasonably nice bracelet I got her one year for our anniversary.  The bracelet somehow turned up missing within about a week of my giving it to her.  Never did find it.  Oh well, it wasn't that nice.  Now the ring...

First was when she ran the vacuum over it.  She immediately knew what she had done and was able to recover it, but it was mangled and completely unwearable.  She put it up in a corner of a cupboard, and there it sat for years.  During this period, Christi would wear her wedding ring du jour.  These were Walmart specials with rhinestones way bigger than any diamond we could have afforded.  They would quickly lose their silver or gold colored plating and become a dull brown color.  But at least they let the world know she was taken!  One time she actually had a girl come up to her and compliment her on her "two-tone" wedding ring.  If you counted the nasty green color it turned her finger, it could probably have qualified as a three-tone ring!

Next came the time she lost the diamond.  Fortunately we were blessed with a minor miracle and it turned up again.

So it was no real surprise the other day when Christi mentioned she was missing half of her wedding ring.  It is a two-part ring that interlocks.  She hadn't realized for awhile that she only had one of the pieces on.  (Of course it was the piece without the diamond:).  She wasn't sure where she might have left the main piece, but she thought it might have been when she took the ring off to cut the boys' hair.  We looked all through the hair-cutting supplies.  No luck.  She wondered if it might have been vacuumed up with the hair.  I think we both thought the other one would look through the vacuum.

A few days later it still hadn't turned up.  I called the kids together and offered a $25 reward to whoever found it.  This was definitely enough to get their attention.  They did some searching, but it remained lost.  Later that day, Christi asked me if I had looked through the vacuum.  It's a bagless model so you just dump the canister directly into the garbage can.  I told her I had not looked through the vacuum and in fact, I had just emptied the vacuum into our outside garbage can.  She looked somewhat panicked.  She told me she thought there was a very good chance her ring had been dumped with it!  She said she would go out and look through the garbage can.  I have never seen Taylor or Parker volunteer so quickly for a job, particularly such a disgusting one.  They literally jumped out of their seats and ran to the garbage can.  Sure enough, less than ten minutes later, Taylor came in victorious.  I immediately paid up.  Parker was quite discouraged, feeling he had tried just as hard, but had been gypped out of 25 bucks only because he had seen the glint of the ring a split second later than Taylor.  It just wasn't fair.  I pulled out one of our family's favorite lines (or at least mine!):  "Fair is overrated."

Anyway, Christi has her ring on her finger once again.  How long will she keep it this time???