I’m in Ohio; I’ve been having some side effects from Cipro; I’ve been doing other things. But I am not dead as of this typing and so that is not the reason for the long silence. I have been playing Words With Friends with someone, but that is not the reason either. There is no reason.

There is a reason as to why I got myself in a bad spot in the WWF game – and it involves the dead. I hate putting it like that; let’s say it involves the influence of my late father.

I was stacking a word and it would only work with SHI* or SHIP. The second choice left an opening for my opponent. The first choice, obviously scatological, was fairly safe, but not from the voice in my head that said, “I don’t believe a lady would do that.” Now, let me tell you, I have adapted to this new game that lets you try out a word without risking a challenge and accepts slang and foreign words and words that are followed in the dictionary provided by the information that said word is a valid word but no definition is available. As I remarked to someone: This is not my Daddy’s Scrabble.

But I couldn’t play SHI*; I can’t even type it here. I could have just abandoned the whole thing, but I believe it was for quite a few points and I was greedy. I figured it was early in the game so I went with SHIP, although it left a good opening for my opponent.

She didn’t need it; she made a brilliant placement move of QUID and there sat my “s” in SHIP. I had drawn yucky letters and couldn’t add MATE or PED to SHIP. So it is still open. Of course, the SHI* word would have taken the same “s” but I couldn’t play it and if I had really listened to my dad about not being greedy, I would have let the unwise SHIP go as well.

So now I am sitting here feeling dumb and greedy about SHIP . . . but ladylike. And that’s why I’m looking at the game and thinking, “Oh, DRAT.”