Yarn Along

New to me, joining Yarn Along, and of course, WIP Wednesday.

Reading: on Kindle app When We Were Strangers (Schoenewaldt) and Death on A Longship (Taylor) and of course, At the Still Point: A Literary Guide to Prayer in Ordinary Time (Arthur)

Knitting:  Caffe Macchiato (pattern by Moldan).

Cooking: Last night I made for the fourth time my new favorite recipe  Chicken Tikka Masala (Epicurious).

 

I'll be checking in on your blog and seeing what you are knitting, crafting, thinking.  Leave a comment and I'll be sure to follow you.

 



Travertine and Scrabble

This travertine was beside the highway on the way to Durango.

Travertines are natural hot springs erupting from the ground, spewing not only water but also limestone and other minerals that solidify over eons, creating an unusual looking formation.  The surface is known as "tufa" (an excellent Scrabble word), a porous deposit that looks spongy.

At Ft. Lewis College, Scrabble was the game of the day.  Here is a picture of some competitors.

The tournament was held in a math classroom.  The most interesting things to observe there were poster pictures of mathematicians.  Such as:

 

And my favorite:

 

At a study hall across the corridor we saw four deer and a rabbit grazing and resting together.  I got several photos through a window, and this is one that processed better on the iPad:

It was a fun weekend, although we ran into snow on the way there.

And unbelievably, I achieved second place in the Late Bird, and won forty bucks, almost paying for gas to get to Durango!

On the knitting side, I finished these ballet slippers:

Not Just Another Scrabble Tournament

...because this time the tournament is in fairly close proximity, beautiful Durango, Colorado.

In a few hours I'll be on the road to Durango to fling down tiles over the next two days.  All the details are here.  It should be a beautiful road trip with the fall colors still displayed.

In this morning's Daily Mail there was a post about 101 ways to win at Scrabble, a small book by Barry Goldman.  The tips are what most tournament players already know, but darned if he won't make a mint of money on his little book because he got great print media coverage for his production.  Well, good on him.  He does not mention cheating of any sort.  (By the way, if you want to read of my little heartbreak with a cheating scandal five years ago in a Calgary tournament, check out my prior post from 2008.)

The Apple app Words With Friends is a really fun game, in my humble opinion.  But people do cheat there (a lot) with a cheater app, so it is really just a fun kind of way to learn new words withouth taking the game seriously, win or lose.  My friend Ginger played the word ZAPTIEH and told me she looked it up; she got over 125 points for it, if I remember correctly. We both laughed and decided neither of us would remember that word.

If you play Scrabble and want to play me on WWF, invite me with my handle of "templeton7" and I'll be sure to let you beat me.

Onward!