Okay, I do apologize for the title of this post… but it is funny on more than one level. So, I’m not sure I fully explained that we had planned the camping trip to Quartzsite, Arizona before we started getting texts from my daughter’s boyfriend telling us that he was going to propose to her, and that he want my wife and I, and his parents, to meet them in Sedona, Arizona, where he was planning to propose to her, so that, later that same day, we could all surprise her at their favorite Italian restaurant for a celebratory dinner… or maybe I did tell you that… it is hard to keep it all straight.

My daughter and her boyfriend… now her fiancé… life near Scottsdale, Arizona. So, us camping with my wife’s aunt and uncle, also in Arizona, to go to that big annual swap meet… yes, the one where I petted the 68 dogs… was all pure coincidence.

But here is another huge coincidence… and this kind of thing happens to me all the time… in weird ways I can never explain… but I have this weird connection with fate and the universe that puts me in just the right spot at just the right time to have something weird happen.

There we were, in the desert, waiting for the phone call from my daughter, telling us that Jason had proposed to her… but we had to pretend it was a surprise, even though we knew it was going to happen before she did, so we could be at the dinner later that night… if you follow me… and, while I stood there, listening to my wife pretend to be surprised by the announcement, I looked down, and there was a heart-shaped piece of pink quartz… (I know, the photo, which I just now took with my old, cheap camera, makes everything, including my hand, look kind of yellow)… Well, and I don’t know what the odds of this are, but while I was pacing around listening to my wife talking about how ‘we wished we could be there’… ha!… I looked down, and there was a white, heart-shaped piece of quartz… I am planning on giving them to my daughter and future son-in-law… but I forgot when we were saw them, later that day. Hey, there was a lot going on.

Now, in case you think I am exaggerating this weird, magical ability I have to have weird, magical stuff happen to me… here is another photo… I just took… of two tiny marbles I found that same morning…

I found the first marble, which is smaller than any marble I have ever even seen, mixed in with all those billions of rocks out there in the desert. That, in itself, is not weird. But, an hour later, when I was taking our dog, Shiloh, on a walk to go potty… no… not me… I mean so she could go potty… I crouched down to pet her at some point, and, under an overhang of rock, where I would never have seen it if I hadn’t crouched down, was a tiny marble identical to the one I had found an hour before and hundreds of yards away… and, before you pretend that this isn’t amazing, go back and look at the pictures of the desert where we were camping. This wasn’t flat sand where marbles would have stood out. This was a wasteland covered in small bits of broken up quartz and stone.

To find two heart-shaped pieces of quartz and two marbles in one hour, scattered about in this environment is weird… on more than one level.