ZOMG.

Luckiest Scrabble game ever last night. Early on I drew the tiles for three seven-letter words in a row. “Striver,” “daemons,” and “unheated” (the last built around an “e” from an earlier play).

Usually Zach and I are evenly matched. I have a slight vocabulary edge and typically make one or two seven-letter words in the course of a game. (I don’t remember getting three before, and certainly never consecutively. Nice fluke.) But he is a superior strategist and will often cannily block future plays or cut off building spots while I am fooling around trying to make fancy words. Being an accountant, he not only keeps score for each game but has also kept all the score sheets. Our scores for each game are generally close, and at last tabulation our lifetime win/loss records were very close as well. But last night I kicked his ass! I had great tiles and he had suckish ones, mostly vowels (at one point he expressed the wish that we were playing in Hawaiian or some other vowel-intensive language).

Xerxes joined in the game, hopping onto the tabletop and trying to move our tiles for us until he got bored, curled up in the top of the Scrabble box, and fell asleep. I

I went to bed all exhilarated, tingling with good fortune and victory, and promptly had the most mundane dream of my life. I dreamed that I cut and filed my fingernails, all ten of them, in excruciating detail, right down to brushing the filed-off nail dust from my black jeans. Sadly, when I woke up I was as much in need of a manicure as when I went to sleep. Slightly more so, given the minute growth of the nails during the night. Perhaps the endless tedium of the dream was my conscience paying me back for being a bit too gloaty over my triumphs with the tiles.

This afternoon my mother gave me a magnificent necklace of jet beads–long admired and coveted by me–that had belonged to her great-grandmother. Real jet. Lovely.

As she took the necklace out of her jewelry cabinet she started to laugh and asked, “Did I ever show you these?” She had not. “These” proved to be a set of 5 notes that Mom had found in an old college yearbook belonging to my maternal grandmother, who was born in 1900 and attended Valparaiso University in Indiana during the years 1919 and 1920. Space does not permit me to describe my grandmother, but she is fondly remembered by those who knew and [mostly] loved her as “pig-headed” and “a hellion.”

Each note was addressed to Miss Delefern Slocum [yep, that was my grandmother’s name, but she went by Dele, pronounced “Del”], Altruria Hall. The notes were from Ida A. Powell, Dean of Women at the university, and each one instructed my grandmother to “Please come to my office this afternoon between two and four,” or words to that effect. The dates ranged from November 1919 through May 1920. By the fifth note Dean Powell was reduced to saying, “Come to my office as soon as possible.”

On the front of the envelope containing each note my grandmother had pencilled, in the same unmistakable handwriting I used to see on my birthday cards, a note concerning the infraction that had provoked the summons. Here are those notes, in order by date:

“No. 1. Smoking?”

“2nd show at movies, eating with fellow in restaurant after 10 o’clock unchaperoned, talking to man in front of building”

“Phoenix Club dance–going to restaurant after”

“dishes thrown out of windows, roof to take pictures”

“N.D. dance 1:30–should have been 12.”

I expect that “N.D.” referred to Notre Dame. But I would love to know what made her hurl dishes out her windows.

I haven’t posted lately–or commented on other people’s posts–because I’ve been busy dealing with a few things, one of them bad. First, though, something good: I had a wonderful but very quick visit to NY last week. I spent a couple of days with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a while, and a couple of days with my publisher, who couldn’t have been more fun or more hospitable. The only snag was a terrible trip home that involved thunderstorms, hundreds of cancelled flights, long lines and last-minute rebookings, and waaaay too many hours spent sitting on airport floors. Fortunately I had a nice thick Peter Hamilton novel with me so was able to keep myself occupied.

The bad thing is that I’ll be spending most of the summer in Florida, my least favorite place at my least favorite time of year. My mom needs my help. She was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer two weeks ago and is currently being prepared for a regimen of radiation and chemotherapy that will last a month and will leave her seriously debilitated but, we hope, cancer-free. At this moment I’m laundering my stuff from NY in preparation to repack for Florida. I may set out this weekend with my laptop and carryon bag, after shipping to her home a box of all the research stuff for my next couple of writing projects. It’s going to be a busy season, and I may not be very good about staying in touch with people. It is going to be very weird being away from Zach, Xerxes, and my own home for an extended period, but I’m very glad that the nature of my work makes me fairly portable, so that I can be there for my mom.

The delightful Alaska cruise that mom and I were planning to enjoy together next month is, of course, off. To the three Vancouverites: Nuts! I was so excited about meeting you on the 18th for overpriced fancy drinks! But Vancouver is not so far away, and there will be another opportunity.

I am outraged. Outraged, I say.

Just now, having finally, and very belatedly, send the ms. for a long book on the Right to Die off to my editor (a grim story for another day) , I was able to make my way downstairs to get today’s mail.

There were packages for both me and Zachary from the State Department. Oh, goody, I thought: Our new passports have arrived. And so timely! We sent in our renewal forms only 3 weeks ago. (My passport was due to expire in Feb, Zach’s this month, and we feared long turnarounds.) So I ripped open the package, full of innocent glee. Well, that didn’t last long.

A quick google just now revealed that the press and the blogosphere have been buzzing about the revolting new passport design since April! Alas, I happen not to have seen any of that stuff, or anyone’s brand-new passport, and the thing came as such a shock to me that I actually thought someone was playing an elaborate joke. Really. If only I had been forewarned I might have been spared a nasty shock, or possibly considered changing my nationality.

The combination of terrible aethetics and simplistic, ham-handed patriotism makes me suspect that John Ashcroft designed this piece of crap. The worst part is that I greatly enjoy reading and admiring the many wonderful stamps on my old passports–a pleasure made possible by plain pages. I suspect that the montages of Mt. Rushmore, cowboys, choo-choo trains, and something suspiciously like a tablet of Commandments will greatly interfere with, if not preclude, such pleasures in the future. I must be sure to warn Zach, and possibly make sure that he’s had a drink, before I let him open his.

And perhaps it would be as well, when memorizing the short list of useful phrases I try to learn in the languages of countries I am visiting, to add: “Please stamp hard. Our passports are very ugly.”

I ate a few of those Purple Corts tonight and was not impressed. On the bright side, I wasn’t killed, either. Yet.

First I dry-sauteed the two small ones. This is a method I often use for cooking fresh-picked mushrooms, as they contain plenty of moisture on their own. Dry-sauteeing lets you taste the mushroom itself without any butter, oil, shallots, wine, or whatever else you might use when sauteeing mushrooms. In the case of the Purple Corts, this was not a big advantage. Their texture was pleasing, as was their rich black color (I could imagine using them in pasta dishes for contrast), but they did not have a lot of taste, and what they did have was on the bitter side.

Unable to leave well enough alone, I sauteed one of the bigger ones with a little butter, a splash of wine, and just a hint of garlic–a clove swiped around the pan. The result was a moist mushroom that tasted like ever-so-slightly bitter butter and garlic. Made a beautiful presentation, but I did not even finish it.  I’m going to dry the rest of them and see if they will work in a soup later on.

I now feel rather bad about having picked them all, but I won’t do so again. And I have read some things online from people who like eating them, so it was worth trying.

Chanterelles tomorrow! Now there I’m on familiar fungal territory.