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.