by I spoke to my brother this morning. He now has a beard. Yesterday was his 37th birthday. He and his wife have just put their house on the market: they might soon be expanding. The UK has been experiencing a heatwave the likes of which they haven’t seen since 1976.
I’ll have four work-free days in a row soon, so at the end of next week I’ll take the opportunity to do some travelling within Romania. I plan to visit the medieval town of Sighișoara, which is pronounced roughly “siggy-shwara”, just like the place I now call home is “timmy-shwara”. The -șoara suffix is some kind of feminine diminutive, and it comes up in a lot of place names, as well as in words like Domnișoara, which is the equivalent of the English Miss. (Mrs is Doamna.) Because of its prevalence in place names, I got really confused when I saw scorțișoară pancakes for sale. Where’s that, I wondered. The word in fact means cinnamon.
The only trains from Timișoara to Sighișoara take a circuitous route, and they all leave at an ungodly hour. Unfortunately I’ll miss the annual festival, which is taking place right now, so I might end up going somewhere else. But it’s been on my list for some time.
Six games of Scrabble since I last wrote. Three big wins against lower-rated opponents, two of whom resigned before the end, but the others were all close. In one game I found an early low-scoring bingo but my opponent drew both blanks, bingoed with each of them, and kept scoring heavily enough to snuff out my comeback chances. I lost that game by 27. My next game showed that bingos aren’t everything. Both times I bingoed, my opponent had the tiles and the presence of mind to make big scores immediately afterwards. I clung on to win by 22. I was particularly pleased to find BLOOPED in that game. B and P don’t go well together, and it’s easy to give up with a rack like that. I won my final game by just 11 points after going over time by a few seconds and getting stuck with a W. My score of 323 was my second-lowest in a winning effort since joining ISC.
Update: I’ve since had a nightmare game which I had in the bag with both blanks on my rack, only to lose by seven. But for the ten-point time penalty, and possibly the sinus headache I was grappling with, I would have won. Time management is a massive problem for me. Well, it’s not time management as such, it’s just that I can’t see the best plays fast enough, especially towards the end of the game when the board gets blocked. My opponent played all his words in just six minutes. Straight after that horror show I had a lesson with an Italian guy. He didn’t want to do our customary IELTS writing exercise so I half-jokingly suggested we play Scrabble. He agreed. He went first, played SPENT, and on my turn I found SPINDLES through the P. I then had to explain what a spindle was.
Update 2: It’s getting worse. Three more losses on ISC, by 51, 16 and 8.
Update 3: Now two wins! By 27 and 16. Could easily have lost both of them. In the first game I was 133 points down (that’s a lot!) before I remembered from somewhere in the recesses of my mind that CANG was a word. That allowed me to play GLUMmER and gave me just a glimmer. In the second game I led by 109 but was swamped with consonants and swapped tiles three times, and only because my opponent was overrun by consonants at the end was I able to sneak a win.
