“As I had occasion to be reminded today”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/2004/11/24#051124engaged, I needed a new wedding ring.
Now, I went the first 6 3/4 years of my marriage without one. For the first couple, well, it would have given it away–although, in retrospect, there could have been a lot of fun in watching people figure it out–and for a good while after that we just had more important things upon which to spend money.
Finally, though, in 2001, flush with money from The California Job, Anne and I went and got rings.
Now, I’m not much of a jewelry person; I have a class ring that I don’t wear, and that’s pretty much it. I haven’t even owned a watch this millennium. But (never one to be without an opinion) I know I don’t care for yellow gold, which pretty much drove us to platinum.
This of course made them expensive, but if you figure in the wedding we didn’t pay for, the years of our lives not lost to wedding-induced stress, etc., it still seemed like a bargain.
Within a year, I had lost it, I believe somewhere within the confines of our own house.
This was the moment when platinum seemed sorta foolish.
Well, that was three years ago, but I finally decided it was time to replace it. So we went back to Ross-Simon, with a card we had from when we got the originals, thinking we could just give them the little code on the card, and have them order a new one up.
They had changed computer systems.
The code we had no longer meant anything to their system, and no visual inspection of catalogs produced an identical match. Although we initially took them up on their offer to try and research what our original bands were, after walking around for half an hour, we decided that it was not a point of obsession to us that the bands actually match–so we marched back down, and started looking at options.
Now, I’m sure it labels me as a geek–were there any doubt–that as soon as I heard _titanium_, I was intrigued. I was also convinced that it must be expensive–I mean, this is the stuff they make tail sections of F4s out of so they can withstand the heat (if you look at a picture, like “this”:http://www.vogue-web.ch/f4/F-4D-65-0596.jpg, it’s the shiny bits behind and above the exhaust), it’s got to be expensive, right?
Nope. Wrong. Light as a feather, virtually indestructible, and if I lose this one, well, they’re not quite disposable, but they don’t cost much more than a meal at a good restaurant.
Incidentally, you _must_ check out “this video of an F4 being used to crash-test a wall for a nuclear facility”:http://www.big-boys.com/articles/concreteplane.html. The plane disappears more or less without a trace.