Nilly, I've missed reading your fonts. How was your holiday?

Daisy, Liese, and Maria, I loved reading your hockey talk. I remember when Boston used to have a hockey team.

Heya, Nilly!

Crazy hockey watch-n-posters.

The first few weeks at a new job are the absolute worst. I hate that feeling of, "I suck and they were just blind to it and they'll find out I suck and fire me and then everything goes to shit and and and..."

So true. Ugh.

It is almost impossible to express how much I don't want to go to work today. Bleh.

Yeah, we nearly gave it up at the strike ourselves.

The strike killed almost all my enthusiasm for the sport on a national level. I'm used to the corporate suits being motivated mainly by greed and arrogance, but the players outdid them and were so publicly puffed up about the intrinsic value of their talents without realizing that they're only valuable if being used to entertain fans by playing the damn game. Every bit of pampered whining I heard, coupled with many moving to the AHL and displacing veteran Crash Davis-type minor league players who actually needed those jobs to support their families... grrr, I start seeing red all over again more than a year later.

It doesn't help that P.J. Axelsson is the only remnant of MY Bruins left. The rest of the team is a wash of bland unremarkable no-names with Zdeno Chara towering over them all.

It limits some pretty, pretty plays, and penalizes goalies who are good puck-handlers. Ron Hextall wouldn't have been half the 'tender he was if he had to follow these rules.

True. Though if stifled by the current rules, I see Hexy giving up puck handling and saving his penalty minutes for clocking opposing players in the helmet.

It doesn't help that P.J. Axelsson is the only remnant of MY Bruins left.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut Jr. [link]

I missed the hockey watch and post! I set up the dvr to record the Canucks game but didn't set it to go over so I know I missed the OTs. Which is too bad. Sorry about the Pens losing, but they played with heart and played well.

Tonight is the Lightning v Devils. I'm seriously concerned that they'll fall apart like the last 2 regular season games and get destroyed. If it comes down to goal tending then they won't fair well.

Last season I read an op ed from some guy saying that because of the rule changes would eliminate overtime in the playoffs. I can't remember his reasoning, but the rules would change so that there wouldn't be any close games and certainly none of this 2 or 3 OTs.

I think the instigator rule is stupid.

I left my DH on the couch this a.m. watching last night's Stars game. He's going to be so disappointed they lost. My Sabres play tonight. We started dating just before the infamous Stars/Sabres game of June 19, 1999. (Definitely no goal!)

Funny Kurt Vonnegut quote:

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.

[link]

Kindergartner Charged With Felony Tantrum

Avon Park, Fla., is a zero-tolerance kind of place.

On March 28, Desre'e Watson, a 6-year-old kindergarten student at Avon Elementary School, had a bad morning. She cried. She wailed. She kicked. She scratched. She hit a teacher. That's what the police say, anyway.

The police? That's right. To subdue the unruly kindergartner, school officials phoned Avon Park's police department ("committed to enhancing the 'Quality of Life' of the community"). When the cops arrived, young Desre'e attempted to resist arrest by crawling under a table. But Avon Park's finest pulled her out, cuffed her, put her in a police cruiser, drove her to the county jail, and charged this 50-pound menace with a felony and two misdemeanors. The police report is below.

"When there is an outburst of violence," Police Chief Frank Mercurio told a local news station, "we have a duty to protect and make that school a safe environment for the students, staff and faculty. That's why, at this point, the person was arrested regardless what the age." Let's hope his message gets across to those brats in the neonatal wards.

Oh. My. God. Yeah, let's traumatize the kid even more. That'll help.