This has been in effect for a while, of course - a couple of years - and has probably been a minor factor in some of the irreversible changes that have taken place in my life during that time ha ha.
The third and final exact pass was midmorning yesterday, when, as is now usual in this first winter I've spent in Silver for several years, I was in bed with Ginger and this MacBook Air - the current loves of my life - pretending to write a play and playing Lexulous with my warmer-weather tennis partner.
She introduced me to the game last winter, when I was renting living space in Cambridge and sleeping on the floor in a room off the kitchen. (Yes, I know, that sentence is tantamount to Gail Collins' eternal reference to Seamus tied to the roof of Mitt Romney's car.) She's (tennis partner, not Gail Collins, although for all I know GC may well have) played Scrabble - a game I never liked because it's so slow - for years, and knows every two-letter word there is.
Time after time after time I'd be watching some 1940's film noir on YouTube and get that little email ping, to see "X has played the word ZA for 43 points!" or "X has played the word QI for 36 points!", always with that oh-so-exciting exclamation mark.
My retaliations - "P has played the word NO for three points!" or "P has played the word IN for four points!" invariably led to her winning game after game after game, and me getting more and more dispirited, but as I was totally dispirited anyway it didn't make much difference and, trouper that I am, I soldiered on.
I did get better. I learned to do what I considered cheating and go to the online lists of two-letter words, and very slowly my *strategy* improved and I began to lose by only 100 points instead of 300. I don't think I ever won over that whole winter, but I did keep going and over the past festive holiday season I did indeed win every fourth game or so by following X's lead and putting combinations of letters into online dictionaries and seeing if they made words.
Okay, enough background. X's first word in our game yesterday that had me do a double-take was SUQ, then OYER (!), some other improbable combination I've already managed to erase from memory and then she added an S to my PRONE to make PRONES.
That was when I looked in the dictionary we both use, couldn't find it, challenged it, and was directed to the second definition of PRONE: "a sermon or a brief hortatory introduction to a sermon, usually delivered at a service at which the Eucharist is celebrated." Of course! Silly old me.
At that point I resigned, not very gracefully, and went to see what was going on in X's chart - Mars to the Sun exact and Jupiter square Pluto in the background. All is now forgiven and we're in the middle of another game. I'm winning.
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