I tell you, my oldest daughter is something else. Last summer he woke up at dawn and rode his bike to the mall. It was walking distance and she was biking with friends so it wasn’t so much a safety concern I had but more how uncomfortable I felt with her hanging out at the mall all day and not doing anything else constructive with her. weather.

When she started coming home with new shoes, iPods, and various trinkets, I really started to get worried and confronted her one night demanding she explain to me how she was getting these things on a five dollar a week allowance.

To my surprise, he calmly said that he didn’t “hang out” at the mall all day. In reality, she was looking for diamonds in the parking lot, both there and at the nearby Wal-Mart.

My daughter is the only person on this planet who can render me speechless and as I stood there, unprepared for this explanation, she said in her most adult voice, “Maybe I should explain.”

He then proceeded to give me a science lesson along with some deductive reasoning and I must say I was once again speechless.

He told me that changes in temperature have an effect on most material things, especially metal. Different metals have different speeds at which they respond to these changes. This is the basis of the operation of the old mechanical thermostats.

A piece of coiled metal is attached to a mercury-containing light bulb and coils and uncoils back and forth as it expands and contracts depending on ambient temperature, making and breaking electrical connections and thus controlling heating and cooling equipment. refrigeration.

On a hot summer day, most people, especially those who can afford it and therefore can also afford to wear a lot of jewelry, turn their car’s air conditioner on full blast every time they go somewhere. place… that includes malls, malls, etc. ahead.

As they get out of their cars and into the summer heat magnified by a black asphalt parking lot, the metal in their jewelry expands rapidly, and sometimes the diamonds jump out of their settings.

Now I have certainly lost my fair share of diamonds, albeit very very small, almost invisible to the naked eye, but my daughter thought that this was possibly how I, and therefore many others, inexplicably lost diamonds and jewelry (she also claims to have lost I found out where the lost sock disappears in the dryer).

Anyway, after a little practice, my daughter told me that it’s relatively easy to tell the sparkle of a diamond from the sparkle of glass in a basic mall parking lot. She smiled a devilish smile and said that’s what keeps them hidden in plain sight!

In exchange for a small commission, her best friend’s older brother takes the diamonds to the pawn shop and gets what he can for them. The money is shared equally among the searchers and they spend the rest of the day shopping.

I was stunned! How dare he not give these jewels to his poor single mother who loves diamonds by the way! A pawn shop… are you kidding me?

I asked him if he had considered the feelings of the people who lost these diamonds and maybe he should have turned them over to the mall’s lost and found department.

He then asked me if I had ever gone to the mall’s lost and found department looking for any of my lost diamonds and I admitted that I had never thought of doing so, until now.

She looked at me with some satisfaction and said that the people at the mall would probably take them for themselves anyway and that she would be considered an accessory to a crime at that point. He was too tired to argue with her reasoning and too proud of her constructive thinking to punish her.

I asked him how many diamonds he had found to buy all the clothes, shoes, and electronics he had bought over the summer.

He explained that much of what they found were fake stones with no real value. However, after exploring eBay for a while, she realized that people would buy anything unique and unusual.

Cubic Zirconia is anything but unusual, but a Cubic Zirconia with a captured magical spirit that will bring fortune and fame into your life is quite a find. A little creative writing and a made-up great-aunt who had practiced the dark arts, and poof, now you have a stone with a value that desperate people are eager to buy.

The shocked look on my face made her quickly retract her story and she claimed to be kidding her mom, but I don’t know. Sometimes I worry about my daughter. I hope she knows where that fine line lies between creativity and dishonesty. Actually, I’m pretty sure she knows exactly where she is and should be more concerned with how often she’s consciously chosen to cross it.

I had a long talk with her about all of this, but to be honest with you, I now find myself parking as far back in the parking lot as possible now, hunting for diamonds on my way to Macy’s!