Nothing like a company gouging for the holidays! Good luck with that, and I hope your insurance company is a bulldog in that fight. (I hope you have photos to send to all parties involved).

Many hardware stores have an oddball lumber bin - look and you may find a piece of wood that will work for your geode splitter. People make cuts at the store that don't turn out right, or they have leftover pieces they don't want that they leave behind. They land in the bin.

Two eBay items went to the postal carrier today, and two more are listed this evening. This evening a call to the NYC camera store I've sold to and bought from to offer a now-vintage digital camera that I'm no longer using. I've adapted to the new camera and don't need that one as backup when the phone camera can do that. Anything they decide they can't use will be returned and I'll sell for parts or repair on eBay.

Totally unrelated, my next door neighbor asked this morning if I could recommend a book, because her son-in-law said he likes classics. He has read some Dickens. Asking an English major to recommend a book is to open a huge can of worms. We talked about several, then I suggested she visit the used book store (she has never been!) and get a book and then buy a gift card so he can choose something else for himself. (We narrowed it down to short stories by Steinbeck or a classic American novel like Moby Dick—I loved that book, and maybe if he is into reading long books, it'll work for him.) Along the way we discussed Wilde, Dahl, Faulkner, and Harper Lee.