by Last night I had a blissful nine hours of sleep, and finally I can see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s almost like I just have a cold now. This is one of the (few?) downsides of being self-employed: sometimes you get sick. Last year I was “lucky” enough for my illness to coincide perfectly with Christmas (I’d forgotten what that was like until I re-read my blog posts) so it had virtually no impact on my bottom line. This week I’ve got lessons scheduled with four new students, so I really hope I can re-enter the world of the living.
S is staying with her grandparents this weekend. They’re in their mid-to-late nineties, so S clearly has good genes. She said she’d just attended a traditional Christmas pig-cutting, er, event? Ceremony? Exercise? I think I prefer exercise. You can watch several of these exercises on Youtube, such as here. (Look at all the downvotes.) Since S is a vegetarian, I wonder what she thinks of it. My body corporate Skype meeting is on Friday night, so we might push off to Sibiu on Saturday and spend just one night there.
My illness has been terrible for getting out and entering the festive spirit, but good for Scrabble. In addition to the odd occasions I’ve used it as a stress-free educational tool with my students, I’ve played a fair few games online, and mostly I’ve been winning. Learning some high-probability sevens has been a huge help already, but I feel the biggest progress I’ve made has been in scrapping, finding ways to offload awkward tiles, finding less-obvious moves, and making better decisions about what to play and what to keep. I’ve certainly become better at endgames. Yesterday I won eight games out of nine, including three come-from-behind wins in a row. In the last game of the day I stormed out to a 163-point lead thanks to two natural bingos, but my opponent drew both blanks and found two impressive bingos of his own. On multiple occasions I had bingos on my rack with nowhere to play them that I could see, and I became more and more indecisive. I clung on for just a 14-point win. My favourite game was a remarkable one: despite being out-bingoed 3-0, I won 444 to 416, thanks in part to NOVELLA for 52, a double-double that hooked other words. It’s that kind of play that keeps me coming back.
