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National Scrabble Day 2024
Apropos for a lovely Saturday, today is National Scrabble Day. As if we needed an excuse to break out the board and get playing.
Kelly Usually Wins
I’ll always take Scrabble and chess if I’m going filming. But I do have the Scrabble dictionary, which can be infuriating for other players. ~Saffron Burrows
Honestly, what kind of a savage plays Scrabble without a Scrabble dictionary on hand? That level of chaos makes me shudder just thinking of it.
Scrabble is genteel, erudite and thought provoking. It is a civilized pastime for civilized people. Kelly and I delight in any opportunity to get out our board.
Since we play it so enthusiastically, we invested (way back when) in the Deluxe set with the spinning board and the raised tile borders.
Despite the fact that we’ve been playing regularly for the better part of 32 years, we still haven’t burned through our collection of score cards.
If I recall correctly, we picked up a package of extra score pads when we got the game. It’s a treat to spend hours with my beautiful wife trying to score on those double and triple word scores.
Strangely, she almost always wins. It’s always a treat when I pull off a win because it’s so incredibly rare. I don’t get it.
Wordplay
National Scrabble Day!
Maybe Scrabble doesn’t excite you, but it’s something that Kelly and I share a love for. It’s mellow. It’s thoughtful. It’s slow and gentle. It’s a few hours of splendid face time with Kelly.
How can you go wrong? It’s a great way to spend some quality time together trying to take seven random tiles and maximize your score in an ever-expanding acrostic mess.
The challenge of trying to find a spot where you can actually fit a word once the board is nearly full is joyfully excruciating. The great thing is that we can always congratulate each other for a well-played word.
Even when I steal a letter she was going to use or when she takes a spot I had my eye on, it’s never contentious.
We’re just glad to be together spinning the board back and forth, watching each other trying to maximize our scores or escape the trap of being stuck with a J, a Z or a Q late in the game.
The ebb and flow of the game is entrancing for us. Being in close proximity of Kelly is entrancing enough, but being locked in intellectual struggle over those seven random tiles is deeply intimate for us. I hope you have something that gives you that vibe but if you haven’t discovered your quality quiet time activity, I’d encourage you to try Scrabble.
Scrabble Game Show – 1989
Man, I’ve Got A Q And No Vowels
Christmas time, you’re at home with your friends and your parents. You sit down around the table and just play Scrabble. It’s a fun game for me. ~Kyler Murray
Things are suboptimal at the moment. Work is a lot these days. I’m putting a lot of mental cycles and long, long, long hours into the work I’m doing.
In the rare instances when I have enough presence of mind to give half a thought to The Sentinels, I’m flummoxed.
I don’t know what I would want to write if I even had a moment to write. I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a plot. I don’t have much of anything.
What I do have is a crap-ton of stress. I have more work than hours available to do it all. I really want to just pull the plug at the end of the day, switch gears and get writing.
I literally cannot.
It’s frustrating as heck and I need to figure out how to get past it.
For now, by the time I’m actually too tired to continue working in any given day, I’m also entirely too freaking exhausted to do anything but sit here and veg.
I’m too hyperstimulated to sleep and I’m too starved for not-work-time to let it slide, so I sit here and binge watch in hope of inspiration, direction or some idea to tweak my story conundrum.
I can’t even call it writer’s block. It’s not that thing where you look at the blank page and have no direction. It’s that thing where you can’t even conceive of looking at the blank page.
I’m just too freaking tired to do what I desperately want to do, but I’m too full of anxious anticipation of being able to just go to bed and rest up from all the darn work.
Much like a late stage Scrabble game, the free space is largely chewed up and there’s virtually nowhere to put a word. I feel like we’re out of tiles and I’m stuck with a Q and no vowels to attach it to.
At least I’ve got my Scrabble date with Kelly. That’s a relaxing alternative to work. Maybe it will clear my head enough to do some planning on the tridecology. Maybe…
That’s it for today. I’ve got to go play Scrabble with my beautiful wife. I hope you’re having a lovely entrancing weekend.