Tootle

I woke up early this morning with a nasty migraine, which is strange because I don't usually get them in the morning. There's codeine somewhere in the back of the cupboard for this sort of thing, but I couldn't find it in the dark and I'm not massochistic or stupid enough to turn on the lights. I sat in the darkened livingroom with my hands over my eyes until I eventually started feeling better and then I shuffled back to bed. I'm still a little upset about how much time that wasted, not that I could really help it.

The specifics are vague, but from what I've gathered, someone (I won't name names) allowed the subscription to the antivirus program on the desktop computer to lapse. Now apparently there is a virus on the computer that is not only preventing a new, working version of the program to be installed, but also blocking all access from that computer to websites related to antivirus programs. Fun, eh? I spent several hours today exhausting every brilliant idea I could come up with to fix it to no avail. I don't think it will be fixed any time soon. At least my computer works.

I managed to lose an hour while riding the bus today, and turned up late to a meeting about the sprinkler and alarm system for my building. Where exactly the time goes while I'm on the bus will forever remain a mystery to me.

Tonight I got sucked once again into a game of Scrabble with the parents, which isn't really a problem, except that my father nearly always wins and I am most often dfl in the rankings. This is naturally not a good thing for my ego, though I guess it's good for my brain.

Often to my parents' chagrin, we play by the rules that everything in the official Scrabble Dictionary is legal. The beauty of this system is that when I'm lost for words, I just rearrange my tiles until I come up with a combination that looks like it might possibly be a real word. More often than not, when I look it up, I'm surprised to find that it's actually there. If it's not, I just say it is and the game continues like normal. More often than not, nobody notices, because that particular dictionary has some of the stupidest, most bizarre and archaic spellings of words you will ever see.

I guess some would wonder why I bend the rules like that, especially since I rarely ever win the game. The answer is simple. It's so much more fun to lose with interesting words that everyone fights over than it is with boring words that everyone knows.

I hate to be beaten at my own game, though, and that is exactly what happened tonight. After a breif and unusual sojurn into the depths of the dictionary, my father came up with what I thought at the time was a stupid word: tootle. They don't get much stupider than that.

To add insult to injury, my mother left for some reason near the end of the game and my father and I took the liberty of disposing of her last tile, an R. We tried a few different places on the board before I finally put it where it would get her the most points.

tootler (n) one who tootles

Stupidest fucking word ever. And with that, she managed to beat me by two points. Again. The things I do for my mother.