Sean is visiting this week so we took some time off from work to hang out with him. I managed to snag some vacation time today and so did Sean’s brother, Tim, but My Darling B had to work, so it was just the boys today. What did we do with our quality time together? We played Scrabble. And had a pretty good time doing it, too. We were going to play regular Scrabble but then we bent the rules a little bit. Threw out the rule about no proper nouns entirely, and for the rest we decided that we could use any word that we could find in the Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary I have on my desk. That made it a little easier to play, but not much. We’re mostly four- and five-letter Scrabble word players until we get near the end of the game. By that time the words all trail over toward the right-hand side of the board and all that’s left in our cradles is either something like “QZKRX” or “IEEIIAI,” so we’re mostly playing two-letter words at that point.

We played a second game but, instead of working with just seven tiles in our cradles, we each picked ten on the theory that it would be easier to form words and the game would move a little quicker, but that’s not what happened. It turned out to be a lot harder to decide on a word, probably because of the endless options. Nobody wanted to play a four-letter word when they had so many more possibilities, if only we could figure out what they might be. Which we couldn’t.