Nerdular Nerdence

The highlight of my day: playing an epic game of Scrabble. With myself. You see, the kids I nanny were off playing by themselves, and I was dozing off as I tried to read. I saw the Scrabble sitting there, so lonely and clearly never played, and I had to rescue it from its perch. Tomorrow I'm teaching the kids how to play. Never too early to learn, I say, even though the 7 year-old only spells up to five-letter words. No time like the present to improve his vocabulary! But I digress. Back to the game.

At first I decided not to keep score, but when my first three words earned me significant points, I had to keep track. Final score: 265-208. I'm not one to brag, but seriously, you should have seen my board. I was relieved of my duties before I could use all of the tiles - there were maybe ten left - but up until then, every word occupied at least one Premium Space, if not two. The notables: MAZE with a Triple Letter Z (35), QUILL with a Triple Letter Q (33), FAXES with a Double Letter X *and* F (27), JEDI on a Triple Word (36), and my personal favorite, QAIDS, one of the ten or so words that don't require a U after the Q. For those of you who are wondering, yes, JEDI counts, according to the SOWPODS Scrabulous Dictionary. I looked it up, because I am that nerdular. Also, I needed to take my mind off of the 9 year-old, who failed to announce that he'd forgotten his towel for his shower, and sauntered through the doorway and into my line of vision completely naked. Mortifying for us both, let me tell you.

Apart from that misadventure, the game was in all seriousness the highlight of my day. Well, that and receiving several air kisses from sweet little Camille, who can't share to save her life, but apparently adores me after taking my class for only four days. Sigh.

::edit:: I just read an article about folks who put my nerdence to shame. A carpenter from Massachusetts scored 830 in a game, with almost half of his points stemming from one word, QUIXOTRY (a quixotic action or thought). That's 365 points, landing a "triple-triple," or two Triple Word spaces with one word. That's nine times the value of the original word, plus 50 points for the bingo (using all seven tiles). Clearly, I need to step up my game, but I have better things to do than study the Scrabble Dictionary. Studying for the GRE, for example...ahem...