One of the Y's went missing

It was that kind of a day. I waited for a ride that didn't arrive. Tried to order some of those fixed postage boxes from the USPS and had no luck with Uncle's web site. When I called the telephone company to turn off Mom's service, the voice at the other end demanded to know just who I was and I was honest (I should have lied and pretended to be my mother). After I blew up, the voice asked if I had power of attorney. Yes. Well, fax us the document. My machine receives spam faxes quite nicely, thank you -- but it won't send. More hassle -- beg a ride from a neighbor to get to the Goodwin Street Pharmacy, whose fax machine does send. Eight pages worth.

So by 6 p.m., I was ready to relax with a couple of quiet games of Scrabble with a buddy. We played two games and as we were clearing the board for number three, a tile bounced off the table top. Likely into the baseboard radiator. We moved the table, I groveled down on the floor, flashlight in hand. No tile. Maybe we didn't lose one. Checked the Scrabble paperwork & we were lucky -- it told us that there are 100 tiles in a game. Friend counted the remaining tiles. Oops. just 99 of 'em. Maybe it would help to see which letter was missing. First count all those vowels. A, E, I, O and U all present. If only it had been a missing I, we would have cheered. Next, the cheap consonants; all A-OK. Finally, the high-scoring consonants; all there until we got to the final letter. Only one Y, instead of two. We gave up! Time to move the table back. That was when I spied a little brown square in the middle of the kitchen floor. Our missing Y. Whew!

Maybe it's time to give up on the analog game and go on line. No lost tiles, tho there is that computer problem. The SIL, dotter writes, is turning into a ferocious player at Scrabulous. I suspect he way outclasses me these days.

Blog Notes: Prescott Style, in a comment, has much to say about Lowe's engineering. For a picture of late 40s & 50s Prescott, visit The One Acre Wood.

A Seven Letter Day

There it was, the first play of the afternoon. I drew S-U-G-E-T-N-O. So play S-U-N or maybe G-E-T-S. Oops. Aha!

T-O-N-G-U-E-S! All seven letters used! Wow! Plenty points! Not only doubled, for first play, but a bonus of 50! Believe me, I don't have this happen very often. But my luck didn't hold. Mom caught up and I drew a Q at the tail end of the game, long after all the U's were used up & guess who won. Not me.

On Sundays, I don't do much walking. Instead, I visit with my mother at a local retirement home; we usually play two games of Scrabble. (By the way, in the picture below, Mom is the white hair, I am the mousey one. She's 102. Half-way to 103. Me? Guess.)


As I was saying, we play Scrabble, twice a week. Despite the fact that Mom's eyes are getting thoroughly macularly degenerated. Despite the fact that Mom's memory has really started flaking.

Her Scrabble game is not too bad. She may forget the day of a doctor's appointment or what she had for lunch -- but she recently learned that "D-A" is a word, per the Official Scrabble Dictionary. A new and very useful 2-letter word? Not something she's likely to forget.

Her game vocabulary still includes such goodies as D-O-R (her definition, "a clicking beetle"...the OSD says "a European beetle") and T-O-D (nothing to do with Tristan & Isolde dying on that boat deck, but, rather a "bushy clump" or a "British wool measure.")

And she unerringly spots the double and triple score squares when she works out her words -- even though sometimes I have to remind her to multiply her scores.

One improvement we made to the game is a special set of tiles we ordered from a site specializing in practical gizmos and thingies to help deal with low vision, among other physical problems.

Take a gander at this amazing lady on her 102nd birthday last December. The day she stops wearing earrings that match her stylish outfit is the day I'll start worrying. I am truly blessed in my mother.