A man of letters. The wrong ones.

Hello and welcome to Half-way day!
Once again, I return to the matter of our cheating by referring to a book of approved words - and to the world of familial in-jokes. The thing is, if we have managed to arrange the tiles on our racks so they appear to make a plausible word, we will then check the Mighty Tome to verify its existence. Sadly, our cunningly-arranged that appear to have fallen into a stunningly beautiful word often turns out to be utter gibberish. In other words, it's not in the book. On discovering this, our usual response it to mutter "Stupid book" and toss it to the side in a fit of pique.

On this particular occasion, Julie and myself were playing Scrabble, but were being put off by one of the dogs next door. You see, the owners had gone out for the day and left the poor animals on their own. While the one pooch is fairly stoical, Lulu is quite often gaga. She will bark at the slightest thing, which tends to be somewhat annoying if you happen to have wandered out into your own back garden and she then throws a fit. Left to her own devices, Lulu can't cope and takes to howling pitifully now and then (fortunately, this has only happened the once, and I think her owners realised it had happened when they returned).
Back in our house - a terraced house with thin walls, we were trying to concentrate on making up words by randomly throwing letters together - I mean, playing Scrabble. >sigh<  No, I was just randomly throwing letters together. I'll be honest, I had a f... er, pretty bad set of letters, and the state of the board wasn't helping. Nor was the occasional howl from next door.

It was only after the game ended and I looked back at what I had written, that I realised Julie had used the word 'letter'. Did I say I wasn't feeling particularly sharp that day?

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ps - We are nearing our bicentennial. Yep, that's right, this is our 197th post since the blog began! Not sure how to celebrate it yet, as I have been rather tied up with a nation-wide tour for work, but I'll try to come up with something...