Little Housekeeping On The Prairie

I got a comment! I got a comment! Thanks, whoever sent it!

I reviewed it, approved it and tried to publish it long ago, but it didn't appear in the blog because I didn't select it before hitting Publish. For heaven's sake, why should I have to select it? It was the only one there!

It has been forever since I wrote, and the reason is that I got a comment (a comment!) telling me I should write more often -- or else! It was the "or else" that affected my subconscious, which does not respond well to threats. It (my subconscious) gets all stubborn and huffy.

Of course, that's not the only reason I haven't written. The other reason is ONLINE SCRABBLE.

Why would I sit and laboriously pull thoughts out of my cobwebby brain and organize them in a blog entry that practically nobody reads, when I can sit and toss handfuls of well-arranged tiles onto a Scrabble board, 24/7 if I choose, playing opponents at whatever level of cleverness I choose, some of whom are actually standing in line for me to play them? If there is a heaven, this has got to be it!

Here's how it works. You go to scrabulous.com and register. Then you sign in, click on a room, invite someone to play with you. You can have a chat with your opponent while you play, or ignore him/her completely while you concentrate on not running out of time or on creating your third seven-letter word in a row.

So far, almost all my opponents have been very nice. That changed a couple days ago when I played this guy who kept beating me and asking me for rematches. Now, I have to say that I was not in my best form. I had the flu and was very groggy from working late the night before. So not only was I playing badly (and getting lousy letters, I might add), but I was extremely vulnerable emotionally.

You perhaps can imagine my surprise when, upon finishing our third game, this guy, whose user name is something like glennng2447 (not sure about the numbers), wrote, "You should take up tiddlywinks or hopscotch." I shrugged it off, thinking the guy had a somewhat mean sense of humor. But then he wrote, "You are a really bad Scrabble player." I couldn't believe it! What kind of person needs to dump on someone he's just beaten three times?

My first reaction was to feel crushed and hurt; my second was, in the Scrabulous tradition of using text message abbreviations for everything, fu and thycio. Can't use that kind of language on Scrabulous, though, so I resorted to a milder expletive and resolved to not get mad, get even.

So I'm formulating ways to sabotage this person, to humiliate him, to force him to his knees and beg for mercy. It's kind of fun.

Please come play with me. I'm stickfarmer, of course. You can generally find me in Bingo Boomers or The Lounge. But no tricks! Don't yank my chain! You'll be sorry!