the benefits of reading SF

I played in my first Scrabble tournament last weekend. My objectives, going in, were to use the clock effectively (it's like a chess clock, you press it to end your turn and start your opponent's clock ticking), not to break any rules, and not to care if I won or lost.

I lost my first three games (before lunch) by from 6 to 136 points. So maybe they scheduled me for the dregs of the players in the afternoon, not sure, but I won three out of four afternoon games.

Scrabble players, at least the tournament kind, memorize lists. Now I don't do that. Well, I've memorized the list of two letter words, but I can define all of them. I don't study anagrams of various 7 letter combinations (although perhaps I should) but I do have a far reaching vocabulary and sometimes it gets me in trouble.

In this tournament I played "laager", "scry", and "scop". The last two were challenged, and were - of course - good. The first was only NOT challenged because I was playing against someone from my local club who happens to know that I know weird words and that they are real. This doesn't always work to my advantage, though. I gleefully placed a "D" in front of "ELOPE" to run a word on a triple word score once only to find that DELOPE is only eligible in British scrabble, not in the US. So much for all those dueling scenes in Georgette Heyer.

But SF is indeed good for a lot. I tend to keep a sticky note in what I'm reading these days and put down unusual words to then look them up in the Scrabble dictionary to see if they acceptable. I got, and played, WEIGELA, GOBSHITE, and GURRIES from Anne McCaffrey. From S M Stirling I've pulled LAAGER, CHAMFRON, PEYTRAL, and REMUDA. And who's the best? Why Julian May, naturally. That woman has a vocabulary of weird words that would make even jonsinger and lisajulie blink.

I want a refund

This is not the climate that I signed up for. I want a refund, Colorado! Do you hear me? A refund! I'll accept a bright sunny October full of 80 degree days - but you've just got to make some payback. You owe me!

I woke this morning to a white coating of snow on the hills and quarry behind my house - barely visible through the clouds and fog. It is JUNE, goldarnit! And we had snow down to 7000 feet. I live at 6500 feet, and about 12 miles horizontally and more than a mile vertically below Pike's Peak - where it is snowing as we speak. It's 57 degrees at the airport (about 6000 feet) which means it's about 17 degrees on the peak, with everything else somewhere in between.

Where is my sunshine? How are are my tomato plants going to survive? Or the roses? At this rate we won't even get meltoff from the high mountains into the resevoirs at 8000 feet. Dagonit, where's my summer!