Saturday, January 20, 2007

Scrabble in North Salem

I finally made it back to a scrabble tournament after a nearly two-year hiatus. Unforch, my rating slipped as I ran into a bit of bad luck and a tiny bit of rust. I was happy with how I played, tho the results didn't match my efforts. I ended the day with 3 wins against 4 losses, but because all of my losses were by less than 35 points and two of my wins were blow-outs, I finished with a big "spread" (positive or negative total points). The spread only shows that I was playing well but doesn't figure into national ratings or rankings.

The venue was new to me: North Salem, NY, about an hour's drive from New Paltz. Cornelia Guest puts on a very nice tourney there, attended by 32 ardent Scrabblers -- she even had a 10-person waiting list for today's games. I was the second-highest rated player, and the way our ratings work, I was expected to win about 5 of the 7 games. As a result of my poor showing, my rating falls into the 1750 range, but still, that puts me within the top 150 nationwide.

Here were some of my more unusual words from the tournament:
TENUTI (pl. of TENUTO, a musical term)
SATYR (a wood nymph) ... this is the only one I could define without the dictionary!
JOWAR (type of cereal grain grown in India)
COFFS (to buy)
AUXINS (substance used in plant growth)
BEZEL (a slanted surface)
QUERN (a hand-turned grain mill)
JEON (S. Korean monetary unit)
CURF (an incision)

Bingos (using all 7 tiles for a 50-pt bonus):
Note: Letters in () were blanks
SALTIER (R)
ENCASED (S)
ANTIQUES
FELLOES (def: wheel rims)
ULULATES (U)
INANEST
NEATEST
INQUIRES (R)

I managed to win my penultimate game by over 200 points, scoring 552 (and the "high game" prize, good for $5). In the 7 games, I scored 351, 359, 361, 431, 402, 552, and 349, averaging just under 400 per game. Sadly, average score doesn't figure into ratings, either, tho some have advocated for this.

I look forward to returning there in two months. Meanwhile, I'll keep reading the Scrabble dictionary (me=nerd) and playing online as much as possible.

Monday, January 01, 2007

I Can Drive 55


During my seven semesters at Vassar College, I made many trips to New York City. I often went into Manhattan to do my laundry. I visited my parents and brother or had a fun weekend in the big city. Occasionally I drove a friend or two to Yankee Stadium. My reasons for traveling varied, but one thing was consistent: I drove fast. I knew that highway 87 was wider and safer (in those days, the Taconic Parkway was mostly two lanes), but 87 was a haven for ticket-writing police whereas the Taconic was just a haven for speeders. In all of my trips to and fro, I never got a ticket, but I always sped. My fastest trip door-to-door was 65 minutes for the 78-mile journey. Oh, and back then, the speed limit was 55mph.

Speed was a hallmark of my driving for the next 18 years. Time slows down for objects the faster they travel, and I probably added at least a nanosecond to my lifespan. But then four things happened that changed that forever:

1) I moved to the calm and bucolic climes of New Paltz,
2) I turned 40 and got that much closer to actual adulthood,
3) Gas prices passed $2/gal (and then $3/gal), and
4) I started driving my Pontiac Aztek much more often.



Factor 4 was probably the most instrumental; the Aztek has a lot of cool gizmos, including control-panel readouts of one's instant- and overall-fuel economies.

I did a little experiment last month: I drove for three flat miles at different speeds to see how efficiently the car drove. At 75mph, I got about 22mpg. At 70 and 65mph, I did a bit better. By 60mph, the mileage was amazing: over 31mpg. That means that by maintaining a rate of speed 5 miles per hour below the speed limit, I can use my gas 30% more efficiently. Another gauge on the Aztek monitors how much gas has been used on a trip. By driving slowly, I have made the 85-mile trip to Manhattan while using only 2.7 gallons of gas. Another way of looking at it is that if a tank of gas costs $40, driving 30% more efficiently is like getting the gas for $28 instead. Or: If a gallon costs the average motorist $2.50, I'm getting it for the equivalent of $1.75. Take that, ExxonMobilCitgoShell!

Life begins at 40, but thrift begins at 60.

Mice in the Hice

Good thing we have a cat, because we also have mice.

One day while the kids were hanging out in the living room, they noticed Stanky running about in a particularly frisky manner. Soon they noticed that he had a mouse in his mouth. He put it down in front of the television and proceeded to play with it, as cats are wont to do. The kids called for me (or did they scream for me?). I raced downstairs and trapped the mouse so that Stanky wouldn't do any further damage to it. While it's one thing to clean up a dead mouse, it's an entirely other thing to clean up mouse parts.

A few days later, we awoke to find another dead mouse in front of the tv. Shirra cleaned the pantry carefully (finding an open bag of cheese crackers in the process), and we hoped that our mouse-finding days were over. At this point, I should mention that Shirra is deathly phobic about mice. She had some as a kid, but when they began to breed, her parents realized that the petshop owner had erroneously sold them two mice of different sexes. Shirra's parents apparently took this to mean that they weren't fated to own mice. They took the mice back to the petshop. Shirra later discovered that her pets had been sold as snake food. The phobia began.

When we lived in Manhattan, some of our neighborhoods were a bit trashier than others. That is, they were abounding in actual trash. The toughest place for her to live was our 114th Street apartment because it was down the street from a popular church that had a popular soup kitchen. Garbage bags regularly appeared on the curb outside this house of worship, but what really brought out the rats was the abandoned building across the street. Rats used to race over to the garbage bags, grab some munchies, and race back to their squathouse. When the garbage bags were out at night, we had to run past them to reduce Shirra's chances of spotting any rats, and when did spot a rat, she needed a few moments to gather her wits and control her breathing.

We went to Manhattan this past weekend, returning late last night. As Shirra and I unloaded the car, Emmett noticed a gift from Stanky. Our beloved cat had caught two mice during our absense and had laid them out parallel in his gift-spot two feet from the tv, as tho they had died while watching an especially boring show. Unfortunately, Shirra was in the room when the discovery was made. She immediately began hyperventilating, but she held her shit together until I made some joke about the mice (something about a particularly boring show on tv), and at that point she had to rush to the bathroom so that the kids wouldn't see her cry. Of course, this made Maeve wonder where mommy was. Within minutes, all of the kids were crying too: the girls at the site of their mother's tears, and Emmett because someone's elbow had jammed his eye while he was running to take care of his mom.

As usual, Shirra managed to compose herself almost instantly, and the night continued pretty much as normal. She found a lot of mouse poop near the sink today, however, and announced, "I guess they've hunkered down here for the winter. Great." She also announced that so long as we live in the country, we can never be without a cat.

No-Starbucks Diet

The title says it all. I've given away my best secret. The key to losing weight is to cut out Starbucks...mostly.

As reported earlier, I began a Calorie Restriction diet on my birthday two months ago. In that short time, I've lost nearly 20 pounds. That's a bit faster than one is supposed to lose weight (5-6 pounds a month is recommended, at most), but I was afraid that if I didn't see results quickly, I'd give up. I don't know what my caloric intake was before Halloween, but since then, it's been only about 1600 cal/day. I'm guessing that I had 3,000 calories a day beforehand, and a lot of them came in the form of fats.

When I was teaching, my days were excessively long. I awoke at 6:30, tutored a student before school, taught from 8:30 till 3, and then tutored straight from 3:30 till about 6:30; I unicycled to and from work each day. My days were pretty exhausting. I self-medicated in order to stay awake in the afternoons, and my medication was available right down the block at our local Starbucks. In a typical day I had a vente latte and a huge chocolate chip cookies. Simply by knocking out this trip, I avoided 1,130 calories a day including many grams of fat.

Starbucks drinks are hard to give up. Thankfully there's Shirra, a fellow addict, to help out. These days, a couple times a week, I'll buy her a small or medium pumpkin spice latte, take a few sips, and give her the rest.

I have lost 20 pounds, but one thing I have kept is... lots of cash. Starbucks is high in fat, calories, and cost. Eliminating my daily treats has saved me over $100 in a short time.

How does all of this relate to New Paltz? Well, there is a Starbucks in town, and the people who work there are really nice, but I don't see as much of them as I used to.