It's Style…

It's not price; it's style that determines whether your gift of jewelry is received in same spirit in which it is given. To give jewelry that delights, match gift to recipient's style. Jewelry is one area where you cannot give a gift that you would love to own. Your idea of a fashionable bauble may be another's idea of junk. Is intended's style casual or more formal, traditional or contemporary? You wouldn't give a Swatch watch to your great-grandmother any more than you would give a diamond tennis bracelet to your Goth niece. Select a compatible style and your gift will stand out among recipient's favorites and ensure that gift never finds its way to regifting closet.

The Many Faces of Pearls

Any woman over age of 30 appreciates a fine strand of pearls. They're elegant, timeless, and suitable for most occasions. Think back to your favorite old movies; most leading ladies wore pearls at some point during movie.

Pearls are only gemstone created within another living organism. Natural pearls are grown without any human intervention when a speck of sand or other irritant lodges itself inside an oyster. Deteriorating environmental conditions have rendered natural pearls all but obsolete.

Cultured pearls have quickly filled void. The only difference between a natural pearl and a cultured pearl is that human intervention is required to place irritant inside oyster shell. By controlling size and shape of irritant as well as environmental factors, cultured pearls guarantee greater quality control. You’ll find pearls in many hues ranging from white South Sea pearls to black Tahitian pearls, and covering a lot of territory in between: pink, green, blue and ivory.

Set backs are common, but we rarely welcome them. We are inclined to respond negatively to adversity. It may be time to revisit that reflexive response.

I had an experience recently that caused me to reconsider whether a negative response to adversity is always justified when I was confronted with a life-threatening situation.

It was mid-morning on a warm and pleasant Saturday. I was in midst of my first skydive of day. It was my 2,123th jump since having taken up sport fifteen years ago.

After about one minute of freefall and 5,000 above ground, I parted ways with my fellow jumpers to get far enough away from them to open my parachute safely. I initiated opening around 3,000 feet above earth.

My parachute opened with some twists in lines between parachute and me. This is not that uncommon. What was different this time was that I was not able to clear twists.

The twists in lines caused my parachute to take on an asymmetrical shape. Receiving asymmetrical inputs, canopy did what it is designed to do and initiated a turn -- that's how it's steered. The problem occurred when turn quickly became a rapid, diving downward spiral that was spinning me a full 360 degrees about once every second. This was a problem.

I looked up to assess my canopy and saw something I don't often see - horizon clearly visible ABOVE trailing edge of my canopy. This meant my canopy and I were now on roughly same horizontal plane. In that I could see horizon behind it, I was actually above my parachute and it was leading our fast spinning parade rapidly towards mother earth.

My first need was to acknowledge that I was not going to be able to solve this problem. This is not as easy as it seems. Having successfully completed over 2,100 jumps without having to resort to my second parachute, it was hard for me to believe I had really encountered a problem I could not solve. I had a natural inclination to assume I could fix this problem as I had all those in past.

Sound familiar? It's always easy to lapse into denial when confronted with a problem. Until we acknowledge problem and our possible inability to solve it - or to use methods we have used in past - we don't have a chance of making things better.

Fortunately, urgency of this situation caused my hard-headed nature to yield much quicker than usual. That decision probably took a second or two. The next step, having accepted need to follow a different course than in past, was to determine course. Fortunately fifteen years of training and practice before every day of jumping took hold.