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About Us
Us is mostly me, Jody. I do most of the lapidary work. My husband Jim is encumbered by a job, but is interested. He helps by cutting slabs sometimes, helping with equipment issues, buying some rock, and doing rockhounding while on his photography expeditions. He is a wonderful landscape photographer, and is often in strange remote locations.
Unfortunately the kind of photography used here is not very interesting to a photographer of his calibre, so I resort to the scanner and my little amateur camera.
We are in the southern Sierra Mountains, between Ridgecrest and Bakersfield in the Kern River Valley area. This is high desert, full of cactus, sages, scrub oak, insects, reptiles in cluding rattlesnakes, and lots of wildlife. We are pretty rural, which has it's drawbacks, but it is very peaceful here. Peace and quiet is worth a lot.
It is HOT in the summer, cold in the winter, and my shop is often invaded by lizards and snakes, bugs, tarantulas, voles, and bats.
Most of my life I have been a professional musician. I got into cabbing by accident. My interests before moving here, besides music, were animals, including horses, and serious gardening. I couldn't move my horses here from a cool climate, and you can't garden here. For a couple years I worked on finishing my degree in computer science, and then there was a void. There is no work here, little music to be done, and we're too remote for students to come. I was fooling with making stuff out of concrete, got into mosaics. I got a machine to shape mosaic pieces, and discovered it would work on rock. Since then I have acquired a lot of rock equipment, and haven't made another mosaic.
My computer took this picture. Behind me you see Bennie, one of my two canine supervisors. We live in a log cabin that was moved when they dammed the Kern River. It was once the Kernville Saloon.
Someday I'll put a photo up of myself in cabbing regalia. Cabbing is messy, one wears a magnifying head visor and generally looks pretty weird.