Steph

I you had a clone with exactly your memories and personality, how well would you get along with yourself?

When you look at the reproduction items that you got when you visited American historical sites as a child .... and you realize that now your repros are old enough to be vintage ....

making marble memories with Dad ... priceless.

More sunshiny marbles. Lovely.

iguanian

Ah, sunshine on a cloudy day

Your cats eyes are Peltier, Vitro and Asian that I'm sure about. Plus odds say there will turn out to be some Marble King cat's eyes in there also. The large Peltier Banana cat's eyes could be worth a few bucks apiece. (You have one in a pale green and one in yellow-orange.) So still not bunches, but they're nice to have.

We just got good news on our move. Better not do any chicken-counting. But we went to a new bank where the loan approver is a good friend of a good friend and they did something the old bank could have done but didn't care to, and now we're pre-pre-approved with instructions to start house hunting and just be sure to call our banker back before we make an offer because she'll know things our offer needs to include, things we don't know about, having never purchased a home before.

magical

cooool a satellite photo? some other kind of aerial?

p.s. 23 is my favorite number.

Hi Serine. Welcome. I think mostly a fun collection. Mixed ages. Some from around 1930 and a smattering of others right up to modern day. Also a mix of makers. Peltier, Vitro, Master, Peltier, some from Asia (we wouldn't be able to tell company names for those), and I think some from West Virginia swirl companiees. In your last photo, there is a black and red one which might be the most valuable in the lot -- assuming it is mint condition -- which I'll guess it isn't. A single chip can knock marble value down by half or more. One very interesting one to me is the swirly one with the inky blue ribbon on a white and clear base, with a touch of yellow. Nothing is standing out as very valuable, but I'd pull out the two I mentioned.

adorable

Hmmmm ... still not sure. At only 11/16", I am not leaning toward double ingot. Sometimes it needs to be in hand to make the call. The odd thing about this marble is that we seem to be able to see two cutlines in the same view. The two spots where the blue ribbons end. One near the top and one near the bottom. On a regular cork you see one cutline at the top and one cutline 180 degrees away. So something strange did happen to the marble. But what? It's a keeper anyway. Lovely colors.

Today's Jabos -- Tribute To Friendship -- aventurine -- which I assume is the mica variety of aventurine

May you never tire of pecans. I remember we had a tree in Alabama. I LOVE pecans.

More pix please. In the top photo, there is sort of a horizontal line ... just above the center of the picture. Can you follow that line around? What does it look like just to the right and just to the left of the view photographed?

kewl

crunch time

Oooooh. I'm going with funky Akro corkscrew. What size is it? It is looking either like a cork which got slightly folded in the rounding process. Or maybe possibly a double ingot. If it is in the standard 5/8" range, then I'll go with slightly folded.

sounds good to me

You know how sometimes people claim that some language or its alphabet has no vowels? That's the kind of statement which can sound really smart-@$$, or which can make the other person in the conversation sound smart-@$$ because they want to argue with it because _of course_ the language has vowels. Unless maybe it's a click language or something like that, it's got vowels. Butttttt ... I learned yesterday that not every language has an "alphabet". So, bear with me. "Alphabet" has an "alpha" and a "bet" -- vowels and consonants -- written _separately_. Some languages have a "syllabary" ... which presents entire syllables in one unit. So all the consonant and vowels sounds in the syllable are represented with one symbol. And the language has finite syllables you can piece together to speak it. AND ... the word which launched me into that lesson was "abugida". That's a type of syllabary. Abugida (noun): a kind of syllabary in which the vowel is changed by modifying the base consonant symbol, so that all the forms that represent a given consonant plus each vowel resemble one another. And here is a video which explains one abugida, the one for the Inuktitut language. This language has its symbols for its different consonants. And then the direction the symbol is written tells which vowel goes with it. So your consonant will point up or point to the left or point to the right. And that will tell you which of the three vowel possible vowel sounds goes with that consonant. So Ti, Ta and Tu all look alike -- it's all done with the symbol for the T ... but the T is spun around to tell you which vowel to use. So how is that for a word of the day?

Went for the random google search again, where I google for marbles plus some odd term to go with it. Picked "bermuda shorts" to go with "marbles" today .... and saw ads for "marble wash shorts". So ... is that something which ought to go in the industrial uses for marbles section? Do shorts manufacturers use marbles in their shorts-making process?