Scrabulous?

In the really olden days in the Back Arse of Beyond, we used to lose our electricity for days at a time after the merest whisper of a breeze. This reduced me and my five siblings to completing our homework by the light of the Aladdin Lamp and then playing endless games of Scrabble.

I love scrabble. I am an addict. But scrabble has a serious downside. You need other people to play with. And since those long-gone days trapped in a dark house with my siblings, I have struggled to get people to play me when I want or as often as I want.

So I moved on. And in the olden days, at half-past boredom every day I would hurl myself at my laptop screen and burst into a virtual world of mental stimulation.

Yes. That's right. I'd play an ould game of Spider Solitaire. On my own. Winning mostly, coz that's what it's all about.

Occasionally I would play traditional solitaire, Vegas rules. Of course with my addictive streak I had to

1 set a limit on how long I could play Vegas-rules solitaire (I had to stop when I lost more than $1000 or won more than $400)
2 Create a narrative around why I was playing (generally I imagined I was dutiful daughter with a sick mother who needed an operation, for which I was a few dollars short...)

This added discipline and interest to playing.

But those were the olden days. Now in this Super-Dooper-Shiny-Modern-Voom-Voom age, game playing is different. Scrabble is back. Except it's now online and it's called Scrabulous.

ARgh! Facebook is eating my brain. Now I can have as many games as I like going with as many people as I like at whatever time I like.

Scrabulous is gobbling what is left of my gilded youth.

I don't even get paid for winning.

And I can't kick the board over 'accidentally' when I'm losing...

anyone fancy a game?