Current location:	home sweet doublewide
Current mood:	cynical

I should probably give up Scrabble
I drove down to Pinellas Park (a bit past Tampa and across an arm of Tampa Bay) on Saturday and played in a 6-game Scrabble tournament.

Seven people showed up. By 150 points I had the highest ranking. I ended up playing five games (first round I didn't play because of the uneven number of players). A slam dunk to win, right? Wrong. It was a metaphor for my life: the three weakest players trounced me, then I won one game, then I won a rematch with the weakest player. I rarely had good tiles, and I made several foolish blunders. I submit that only I can fail so utterly -- in this particular way.

My rating is now under 1300 again. I left the venue, a former schoolhouse now with a stage and a couple thousand square feet of meeting area, called The Auditorium (it's supposed to have a theater organ in it, but I didn't see any evidence of that apart from a plaque with names of theater organ enthusiasts on it), around 4:30, and turned on the radio for the Florida homecoming game against Arkansas. Florida was trailing 7-0 at that point, and I thought, "Florida will emulate my miserable performance and lose." Before I was home again, Florida had won, barely, 23-20.

On Tuesday I go to Calgary for their 37 games worth of tournaments. I expect to crash and burn. I arrive at ten in the evening, will probably get a place to sleep by two in the morning... it's going to suck. Mama told me not to go, or would have, had I told her earlier. I'll probably be incommunicado while I'm in Canada: no WiFi for the netbook where I'm staying, I suspect. In fiction, something magical and wonderful would perhaps happen to me on the trip. In real life, I'll settle for coming home again safe and sound, to an intact doublewide and a live cat.