Scrabbling

Yesterday, my friend Diana came over with her two boys. Diana and I were neighbors for 9 years. When I say "neighbors", I mean that if we both opened our front doors, we had a direct line-of-sight to each others' dining room tables! There was only 4 feet between our front doors. Ahhhh, apartment living!

I hadn't seen Diana and the boys for a few months - the last time they came over, they visited with Mary, but I was at work. We ordered pizza for the kidlets and Thai for the grown-ups, and put a DVD on for the boys. It's not very easy to hold the attention span of a two- and four-year old! Finally the food arrived, and after filling our bellies, the requisite Scrabble game commenced. The game did not go well from the get-go. All of us pulled crappy tiles at the beginning, and it didn't improve as the game went on. Diana's four-year-old was helping her play by naming all the letters she had ready to play. Finally, we finished up the game, and waved goodbye to the boys.

An hour later, there was a knock at the door, and Jo (another neighbor) was standing there with her puppy, Lola. We picked up all the cat toys (Lola likes to steal them) and shooed the cats back into the bedrooms from which they had recently emerged (they had hidden from the boys). "Scrabble!" she says, and calls her roommate to come down and play. I made a pot of coffee and wifey turned it Irish, and we sat down to play again. The tile draws weren't much better this time around. We chatted and played, and eventually waved goodbye to them, too. We collapsed in the bedroom and watched a couple of episodes of Voyager before heading off to the land of nod.