Me, pick meee! We go rockhounding for fun, and my husband does beautiful lapidary work. NZ is blessed with amazing rocks, mostly in the semiprecious range. Favourite spots include several on the Coromandel Peninsula, for jaspers, chert, rhyolites, carnelian, chalcedony, sundry agates, and petrified wood. Even Auckland has lovely jaspers.
I may do a photo dump later.
Edit: I was in the Loma Prieta quake too, albeit just under 100 miles away in Davis. I was working in a copy shop and taking somebody's order, but we both sort of paused individually to evaluate why we suddenly felt so dizzy and weird. It was kind of fun feeling the big waves, and the big production copiers didn't even jam. Then we all realised that it meant there was a big one elsewhere, and we turned on the radio. We realised that they were probably about to throw out the first pitch in the Bay Area edition of the World Series, SF Giants vs Oakland A's, and it would be havoc. We were right.
My husband was leaning in a door jamb talking to somebody, on the seventh floor of a building (also in Davis), and suddenly the door jamb wasn't there anymore and he started falling. Then the door jamb came back for him, wham!
Fun fact: we'd gone to the courthouse to take out paperwork to get married earlier that day, so I will never forget the date. (Why yes, I am pretty much a romance-free zone, and I got married only because I'd become diabetic earlier that year, and we thought another state might refuse us insurance benefits if we were only de facto married.
)
