Scrabble

Tonight goes down in our history book - we scored 1,095 in Scrabble. That beats our previous high of 1,061 set in 2007. Lois laid all her letters down in one turn 3 times (waterer, boasted and louting) and I did it twice (ignores and echoing). We only cheated a little. The word te on the right hand side is not in the Scrabble dictionary but it is in the chromatic scale: do, ti, te, la, le etc. We use those "words" fairly frequently. Obviously, Merriam-Webster, the publisher of the Official Scrabble dictionary, doesn't know the English language as well as we do :)
We also play with the rule that allows us to pick up the blank if we have the letter it stands for so we use the blanks multiple times in a game which greatly increases the odds of being able to lay them all down at once. In all 5 of the times we laid them all down at once, we used a blank. The 8 letter word quintals across the top was done in 4 turns: quint, quinta, quintal and quintals. All of those are in the official Scrabble dictionary. With the triple word score going across and the double letter score going down, it allowed us to score the q nine times.
I called Grammy with the news tonight which allowed me to credit her and Pappy for the way we play. Although Pappy would not have had the patience for the time we take to maximize our scores. Grammy and Pappy also didn't play quite as cooperatively as we do. I reminisced with her about the expression Pappy would get on his face when he had one or two tiles left in his hand. As I remember, it was the one time in the game when they got a bit competitive to see if they could stick the other person with a few points.

Movie reviews

Sometimes in the summer we go a month without watching a movie but we watched three in the last week. Each one was in a completely different genre. Starting last Sunday we watched Wit. It's a story of a 48 year old woman fighting a losing battle with ovarian cancer. It didn't put a syrupy coating on what it's like to live the last days of one's life in chemo treatment. I loved the honesty of the movie and would highly recommend it if you don't have to have every story turn out right. It might also help you think about writing advance directives.

Last night we watched City Island. A movie about a New York family where each member is holding some secret from the others and the total mess it's making of their lives. It's comedy. Don't look for any transcendent truths - just some good laughs and a feel good redemptive ending. Totally the other end of the spectrum from Wit.

Tonight we watched No Impact Man. A documentary about a couple in New York who along with their 1.5 year old(?) daughter, decide to live a year attempting to make no impact on the environment. They progress into parts of it but at points are without electricity, toilet paper, garbage production, any kind of fossil fuel burning transportation and a host of other "necessities". All food they eat has to be grown within 250 miles of New York. At the end of it they've lived so much better that they decide to only go part way back to their old ways.

So there you go. The first movie reviews you've ever gotten on this blog and probably the last.

Yesterday I decided it was time to clean up the cupboard where my stereo from 1971 is stored. As I recall I paid in the range of $500 for the system. Taking inflation into account that's like spending $2250 for a stereo system now which seems extravagant and unreasonable to me. The amplifier, tuner and turntable are still intact but what's left of the speakers are above the garage. The woofers have long since gone the way of all flesh.

Some years afterward I bought an 8-track player/recorder to go with it and then when 8-track tapes went extinct, I bought a nice cassette player but it quit and they too have pretty much disappeared. So the question is, should be buy a CD player to play music through this system or
shall we forgo hardware based music media entirely and skip directly to some kind of mp3 player?

Back to the system, I knew the amplifier was working because Jonathan uses it to play his music over the built-in speakers this house has. I tried getting the tuner to work but without success. However I got the turntable to work reasonably well and yesterday I listened to the Mitzelfelt Chorale album titled "Anthems of Praise and Rejoicing"* that I haven't heard for probably 30 years. For you sibs, it's the one with "O Divine Redeemer", "God So Loved the World" and other classics. I've loved this set for a long time. I wondered why Mom and Dad might have bought this album because none of the hymns are ones we would have known from church. I asked Mom this morning not expecting her to remember but she thought maybe it came with that set of used records Dad bought at the neighbor's sale in Cochranville.

Now I'm listening to the Mennonite Hour doing such numbers as "To Love someone more dearly everyday..." and songs by a men's quartet that includes Earl Maust who was Dennis Maust's father.

Eldon, I have one of your albums in my possession by New Creation called "The Folk Sound of Freedom".

*If you click on this link you'll see a picture of the album cover that I just uploaded. I joined Discog just so I could upload that picture.