Scrabble Withdrawal

My mainline drug of choice to defeat the lupus purgatory of pain is SCRABBLE.
Yep...S-C-R-A-B-B-L-E.
I am a recalcitrant spelling bee failure having placed second in the school spelling bee at the tender age of twelve.
I never got over it...
NEVER.
Ask my Scrabble pal Tom. He can attest to my tenacity.
We have been playing Scrabble together for 9 years...and I have never beat him in a game of Scrabble...not once.
Oh sure, I have come real close. Last game I actually made him break out into a sweat. BUT THE GUY CAN NOT BE BEATEN...well, at least not by me.
A sane person would have given up trying years ago...nope....never give up, never surrender...that's my motto.
So every time we get together...the Scrabble board comes out and we hunker down to impress each other with newly acquired words since the last match.
Thes occasional get togethers were not able to satisfy my thirst for the big Scrabble dream of a lifetime....I want to play tournament level.
That is like the fellow from England who was the one and only British downhill skiier for the winter Olympics. Didn't they call him Freddie the Eagle...or something like that?
Well for me...just showing up to a tournament would be pretty cool.
So I joined the International Scrabble Club.
And through all the mind blowing pain and fatigue over the past 48 hours I thought well...at least I can play Scrabble. Even a bad Scrabble game is better than none at all.
AND THE SERVER WAS DOWN.
I just could not digest this information.
For hours yesterday...I kept clicking away at the little connection program (WORDBIZ) that opens the whole world to your computer screen.

I've played Scrabble with Canadians, fellow Americans from all over the continental US (still looking for Hawaii and Alaska pals), Ireland, Israel, and South Africa.
And then the qithdrawal started...subtle, but in my already pain crazed state...I started cracking at the edges. I started spelling out my sentences...which makes Little Bear crazy. Because any kid knows when your parent starts spelling things out she has absolutely got to be talking about something really juicy that you are supposed to pretend you do not understand.
I yanked flashcards out of Little Bears reading shelves. C-A-T! D-O-G! T-O-Y!
Tears streaming down my eyes I opened my beloved Scrabble dictionary...eyes blurring with Mabel the migraine monster, a tuch of madness at the corners of my mouth as I went through all the two vowel two letter words. Afraid that one day without Scrabble would dull my cutting edge.
And so I never fell asleep until 2:30 am this morning. Exhausted...perpetually clicking that Scrabble club connection, like a rat pounding away at the bar in a lab cage desperate for the rat pellet.
The only reason I am able to write now is because I finally got my "fix". A challenging little game of high speed Scrabble with a player rated 100 points higher than myself. I whipped through the first game...spewing out all the extra words I accumulated yesterday through the haze of a lupus fog. Beat the pore sucker, re-match and won again.
Hoozah! I am queen of the Scrabble heap for at least the next five minutes. I bask in the afterglow...sip my cocoa and plan my next game...who is going to give me that fix...shall it be a VOID game of no challenges or playing on the edge...five point penalty and lost turn if you challenge your opponent and you are wrong....hmmmmm..........

PS...did I mention that my hubby almost never ever plays Scrabble with me anymore?
I can not imagine why.