When I was back in AZ over the Christmas and New Year holidays, somehow we managed to eek in several rounds of our favorite game: Boggle!
If you’re unfamiliar with Boggle, what rock have you been hiding under? Just kidding. It’s a timed word-search game, the object being to find as many words as possible in 3 minutes–and here’s the clincher–that no one else finds. Sounds simple enough,especially for a writer, right?
Wrong!
I have NEVER won a single round, let alone a game. It’s like I can’t get enough of being beaten by my big brother Micah, who I don’t think has read a book since Lord of the Rings in junior high. He definitely hasn’t read my book. But that’s a post for another day. 🙂
Somehow my computer genius of a brother always seems to wallop the rest of the family. And he even does it without some of our more creative words, ie: gnu: a wildebeest, or nug: one of Pauly Shore’s favorite words. (I, myself, prefer stretching the limits of the English language when playing Boggle. After all, I do it to the rules of spelling and grammar in my writing.) No, Micah simply sees things on the Boggle board that I don’t. I’ll proudly announce my “money-maker” at 5 letters long and worth 2 points-“sweet.” Micah will then calmly say that he has that one too, and he also has “sweeten”, “sweeter”, and “sweetener.”
So I decided that I was tired of losing to Micah, and I was going to make some changes to the game so that even if I didn’t win, at least I wouldn’t lose to Micah. Enter Jacob, also known as J-dawg or JJ. He may have only been two-months-old at our last match, but I had a solid plan to use him to bring down his dad. It was fool-proof. All I had to do was suggest we break out the game when Jacob was awake and needy and then get Micah to hold him.
And J-dawg did his job perfectly. He was the cutest handicap ever!
My plan had only one error. I miscalculated the margin by which Micah usually wins. Turns out that the couple of points J-dawg possibly cost him didn’t even come close to making him even with the rest of us. Micah still beat me by at least 3 points a round.
I’ll need a new plan of sabotage for my next trip home. Until then … -LJ