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.