Blog Number 307

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well it is Father's Day but the kids are not up yet so I do not know yet what my present will be.  According to my wife (and my mother, and my brother, and my friends and any co-worker who has had the unfortunate luck of drawing me in a gift exchange) I am very hard to buy for.  So I am not pumping myself up for this year's gift as it will likely come to me with an apology along with the phrase (excuse), "You are hard to buy for."  I told my wife this morning that I wanted to be treated today like she was treated on Mother's Day, namely to sit on the couch all day with pillows and have people do everything for me (including bathing).  Of course for Mother's Day she was in a cast and neck brace and had a 4" cut on her head and in a lot of pain but still, turnabout is fair play.

I think I have mentioned lately that we are playing a lot of Boggle.  As we get better and better, we take chances on words that might exist.  As far as I can tell, there is no penalty for having a fake word (no matter how real it sounds).  We might have to do so as the wife has taken to writing down many words that sound like words.  We tried implementing a "you have to use the word convincingly in a sentence" rule but that just turned into a comedy-fest.  Last night the wife introduced "feebly" and "stably".  I asked her to say the word "feebly" 10 times quickly and she could not (neither could I - try it, it just sounds funny).  I also suggested that Feebly and Stably might be the 8th and 9th dwarfs that Snow White never talked about.  It turns out both of these are actual words.

feebly: adverb - in a faint and feeble manner; "the lighthouse, flashing feebly against the sleet-blurred, rocky backdrop of the coast of north west Norway"
stably: adverb - in a stable solid fixed manner; "the boulder was balanced stably at the edge of the canyon"

Later, I countered with "eos" and "soe" (note they are palindromes).

soe: noun - a large cask, a tub, a large wooden vessel for holding water; a cowl.
eos: noun - the ancient Greek goddess of the dawn

We did not look up any of these words until after the game was over.  I did mark mine out (not counting them) but the wife stood by her words (and, it seems, rightly so).  In the end, I won by more than enough points that these words would not have effected the end results.  As the son picks up more and more new words, the games take longer (since you only get credit for unique words that no one else writes down).

Well, I think the kids are getting up now so it is time to find out what my Father's Day gift is.  Here's hoping!

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon