Scrabble...

A vacation with the in-laws (I can't use W***e for fear John's students might somehow track us down) always includes a plethora of competitive endeavours of the mind. Our vacation started with a scrabble game: Jill and Sharon vs. John and me. The game did not disappoint. John and I started out strong, but took a few too many risks and soon found ourselves trailing team J&S. Just as we were beginning to accept our inevitable defeat a diamond emerged from the rough that was our letters. "HELIX" was our scrabble savior for the night as long as the sub-words that it created would be legal: "Al" and "Xa". John and I were unsure of both of them but Jill was confident in "Xa"'s legitimacy and so their word challenge only included the word "Al" which was indeed an acceptable scrabble word. We ended up winning the game by a very slim margin, thanks to our good friend "Helix".

**It should be noted that after the game was completed and scored we discovered that "Xa" was not an acceptable scrabble word and therefore the validity of our win is up for dispute. None-the-less, at this point, the beach house records reflect team J&K's victory!

The non-word "XA"

Our scrabble savior...Helix
(Middle left of the board)

The Happy Scrabblers