Pollyanna and Stitch

So yesterday I took my eyes off Justin for a couple of minutes and he took the opportunity to hit our kitchen hutch with a stick. Repeatedly. Now the side of our hutch ($500+ at IKEA) has a whole bunch of deep dents on one side. They don't match the shallower dents on the kitchen hutch doors, which Justin made about three days after we brought the thing home with a toy hammer. They do go well with the dents on the coffee table, made with Lego, but not with the scratches on the coffee table, made with a fork.

Chris and I lost it. We yelled at Justin and sent him to his room until bedtime. He had his dinner alone up there, while Chris and I commiserated about how awful it is to keep having everything destroyed by this little one-boy wrecking crew that is our youngest.

Daniel was pretty quiet throughout our listing of all the stuff we've got that Justin's wrecked - furniture, chairs, walls, floors, toys, etc etc. At one point I said, "I'm just so tired of not having anything nice. I don't even think we should paint the walls [we'd started preparing them for painting that day] because you know we're going to work and work and spend money on paint and he's just going to destroy them within days. I mean, what's the point of trying to do anything nice with our house?"

At this point, Daniel spoke up. "We have some nice things. Justin doesn't wreck everything." Chris and I didn't respond. "We have those chairs," Daniel pointed to the living room.

"You mean the plastic child-size chairs?" I asked.

"Yeah. Those are nice. And we have that chalkboard and painting easel. That's not wrecked. And we have really nice white plastic toy baskets." Chris and I couldn't help it, we started to chuckle. Daniel was just so earnest, and so eager to cheer us up, and so very very very cute.

So yes, I guess I have to admit that we do have some nice things. Of course, they're all plastic and come from Toys'R'Us, but what the heck. I guess Daniel sees the glass half-full :)

You are now about to enter an ancient and hallowed profession which it is your privilege to enter an

Dude! What... happened... to... L... J...?

Just went to my first Orientation Week event. It's been going on for the whole week, but I really didn't feel like sitting through the Motivational Speech Extravaganza again, after enduring it last year. Tonight's event was titled "Choosing a Legal Path", which I figured would be more practical. I figured there might be tables with info on different career paths or something.

No, no, no no nonono. Forty-five minutes of listening to how we are now embarking upon an adventure, a grand profession, an ancient and honourable calling, a chance to serve, to protect, to give to our society, our people, our compatriots as freely and nobly as we have received and regretted and redundated grade thirteen hors d'ouevres - huh? Sorry, started to drift off a little there.

Anyway, I did get some lovely hors d'ouevres and a free glass of white wine, met a few other mature students - we all sort of clumped together eventually - and ran into a guy from my graduating class in high school. Haven't seen him since 1989, I think. He played pro hockey for ten years, in North America, then Europe, then coached and did an MBA, and now he's starting law school. Very, very bizarre, running into him. We chatted a little bit about what we've done in the last fourteen years, and what little we knew of the other folks from our school. Not a lot, since we weren't in the same social circles so we didn't have a lot of pals in common. He was more from the sports-popular crowd, I was more from the geeky-studying crowd. Funny how long ago that seems now - like a whole other lifetime.

For anybody who's interested, here's his hockey career. Ah, the power of Google. Oh, BTW, snarkhunter, I set Google to Klingon too after reading your last entry... ROFLMAO. jlDo' indeed. Try Bork Bork Bork, too - if yuure-a feeeleeng loocky.

Dan Ratushny's hockey career.