Let’s see, “PUDENDUM” on a triple word score, double points on “M”…

Bryan and I often go head to head in board games, and it’s almost always a fierce fight. He usually whoops me at chess and I usually whoop him at Othello, but other than that the contests are white knuckle to the last move. Last night’s Scrabble game was no exception. At one point, the board looked like this:

   A     P L U G S   L   P   M   A   O   W   S A N I T Y   T

I’ve made up a few of the words that I forget, but the important elements are all there. At this point, about two-thirds of the way through, I had a commanding lead of thirty points or so, and Bryan was sullenly considering the board. Comfortable in my lead, I joked that, should he have two “S” tiles, he could make the board look like this:

   A S S P L U G S   L   P   M   A   O   W   S A N I T Y   T

He’d score points for both “SPAWN” and “ASSPLUGS”, nothing to sneeze at. The latter word won’t be found in any Scrabble-sanctioned dictionary, but to the two of us, it’s as valid as, say, “QUIXOTIC”. Much to my surprise, he laid down the two S’s, rocketing himself into a lead which I would not catch for the remainder of the game. In my defense, 1) I was saddled with a “Q” that was literally impossible to place due to the cramped board not once, but twice, and 2) those two words were my idea.

I actually didn’t mind losing – I was glad I got to see “ASSPLUGS” spring into being in tiles, almost as if fated to be there.

We also attended a going-away party for Ariana, another one of the Vienna kids. She’s heading for a year in Brazil. Obviously she is not cut out for a life in the states. Soren, mine and Kelly’s roommate in Vienna, hosted the shindig at his apartment. We only recently discovered that Soren is 37 years old, not 28 as he insisted to Kelly and I. We knew he was a pathological liar – really, he is – but somehow that slipped past us. Must be his moisturizer. The highlight of the evening, in my mind, was sitting in a wooden Ikea chair with Roark when Ariana, two sheets to the wind by now and slurring “I love you!”, crashed into our laps, snapping the legs like twigs. Soren didn’t seem too angry. It’s just Ikea, after all.