February 16, 2004

The Diet of Scrabble

Last night, Jon and I had dinner with my parents. We arrived around 4 to some delicious munchies and 2 photo albums my parents pulled out for the occasion of entertaining Jon. Jon suffered that hour nicely as my parents pulled him back and forth between piles of competing family histories in photographs.

After the stroll down memory lane we ate some of my mother's good home cooking; beef barley soup with porcini mushrooms, chicken cacciatore (my mom's own recipe) with rice, a wonderful salad with her incredible vinaigrette.
Jon and my mother polished off the Sunday Times puzzle while my dad and I caught up a little bit over cigarettes. Then coffee and dessert were served while we started what would be an evening of extremely competitive team Scrabble.

We broke up into teams. Jon and I versus my mom and dad. Mom and dad won the game. But they offered us a rematch which we accepted. Thanks to such winning seven letter words as PLANTAIN (made against a loose "N") and AFGHANS, plus excellent letters, wonderful strategizing and a run of several phenomenally high scoring words, such as HAJIS (on a triple word score, with the s connecting to another word) and AX placed on triple letter scores in two directions, we were able to avenge out loss with a score of 429 to 280.

Feeling sporting we decided on a third game to give my parents a chance to break the tie of one game to one. Sadly for them, we won that game 300 to 280. That was a much a closer game and it was getting late. By the time we were done with the third game, we had about 25 minutes until our 11 something train which gave us enough time for goodbyes and quick ride to the station provided by my mom.

A good time was had by all.

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