I tell you, my eldest daughter is something else. Last summer he woke up at dawn and rode his bike to the mall. It was within walking distance and she was traveling with friends so it wasn’t so much a safety issue that she had, but how uncomfortable it made me that she hangs out at the mall all day and doesn’t do something more constructive with her . hour.

When she started coming home with new shoes, Ipods, and various trinkets, I really started to worry and I confronted her one night demanding that she explain how she was acquiring these things with an allowance of five dollars a week.

To my surprise, she calmly said that she didn’t “hang around” the mall all day. He was actually 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 leave me speechless and while I was 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 deductive reasoning and I must say that once again I was speechless.

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

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

On a hot summer day, most people, especially those who can afford to do so and therefore can also afford to wear a lot of jewelry, run their car’s air conditioner on full blast every time they go. somewhere … forward.

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

Now I have certainly lost a fair amount of diamonds, albeit very, very small, almost invisible to the naked eye, but my daughter thought it was possible that this was how I, and therefore many others, inexplicably lost diamonds and jewels (she also claims have lost). have discovered where the lost sock disappears in the dryer).

Anyway, after a bit of practice, my daughter told me that it is relatively easy to distinguish a diamond flash from the glass sparkles from the basic parking lot of her mall. She smiled a devilish grin and said that’s what keeps them hidden from view.

For a small commission, her best friend’s older brother brings the diamonds to the pawn shop and gets what he can for them. The money is divided evenly between the search engines 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, by the way, loves diamonds! 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 lost and found department of the mall.

He then asked me if I had ever gone to the lost and found department of the mall in search of any of my lost diamonds and I admitted that I had never thought to do so – until now.

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

I asked him how many diamonds he had found to pay for all the clothes, shoes, and electronics he had purchased 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, he realized that people would buy just about 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’ve got a stone of value that desperate people are just eager to buy.

The look of surprise on my face made her quickly retract her story and she claimed to be teasing her mom, but I don’t know. Sometimes I worry about my daughter. I hope you know where that fine line is 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 chat with her about all of this, but to be honest with you, now I find myself parking as far away in the parking lot as possible, looking for diamonds on my way to Macy’s!