This is the new - and not inexpensive - abstract art that was installed in my bedroom today. Notice the colorful stripes, the ghostly marine imagery on the left, the intersecting curves not unlike the flaking of thin plates of some crysalline substance. Mica, perhaps. Observe how the arcs radiate out from (and draw your eye toward) a single, dark point.
There is, in fact, crystal involved, and the dark point is where a toddler forced the pointed end of a whelk shell through a layer of glass into an LCD display. Namely, the LCD display of my laptop, rendering an otherwise completely functional computer absolutely useless.
I was oddly calm when my attention was called to the damage, which happened while the toddler and an older brother were watching a video. Feeling compassion for the kids? No problem.
Feeling compassion for myself? Somewhat harder. What kind of idiot allows two children under the age of five to use a laptop without sitting right on top of them?
In all honesty, though, even if I'd been sitting right there, I might not have known he had the shell. Even if I'd seen the shell, I never would have expected him to put it through the screen. And experience had shown me that nothing bad happens when the kids use the laptop for Netflix or PBS games. Two-and-a-half years and this is the first damage done.
So I'm chalking this up to experience and giving myself some grace. I haven't figured out yet how (or when) to fix the computer, nor have I worked out a timely way to get the information I need off of it. Like, um, a million years' worth of unanswered email that I was going to sift through this weekend. Yeah, I hadn't switched to web-based mail yet. Back to what kind of idiot...
And you know? It's rather pretty. Hard to be mad at yourself or your kids when you discover something so beautiful.
