We are really lucky this week. The famous Tucson Gem & Mineral Show is in full swing this week, and it is great! All over the city, in dozens of venues, people have come from all over the world to buy and sell gems, minerals, pearls, jewelry, meteorites, fossils, crystals, giant geodes .... and Native American crafts, watches, rare coins ... and kettle corn.

We started off fairly restrained, at the first venue we visited, not buying anything even though everything looked really great. In the second venue, I broke down and bought kettle corn for everyone. Eleanor bought a pair of cool bowls made of fossilized stone.

In the third and fourth stops, we completely lost control. Emma bought a trilobite fossil, Eleanor bought necklaces, and I bought a collectible watch. How can you resist? Everything is a good bargain, and the vendors will often drop their prices to wholesale just for the asking. It was a good thing the shows all closed up by 7 pm, so we were forced to go home.

Emma and her trilobite

It is also a good thing we don't have a house back in Vermont, or we would have bought much more "stuff" to put in it. I saw some amazing fossil sheets, as large as 5 ft x 3 ft, for ridiculously low prices. Those won't fit in the trailer ...

When you live in limited space, the key to buying things is that you have to decide what to get rid of at the same time. Something comes in, something goes out. We just don't have the room to accumulate "stuff" so we try not to buy things we don't really need. This shopping spree was definitely an exception.

We will go back to more of the show today (after we pick up Andy, our guest, at the airport) but hopefully we'll just look, and not buy. It's an amazing event and I can highly recommend it for anyone in Tucson this time of year.