Happy Holly-days!

They are almost over. We can see some light at the end of the tunnel, & that light is neither green, red nor sparkly. The "holidays" will soon be over. We end the madness by getting drunk & Auld Lang Syne-ing all over ourselves on New Year's Eve; but are we celebrating the incoming year with hopeful glee, or are we rejoicing the end of an icky year? Since the song is retrospective & a bit of a dirge, I think most of us have always been thumbing our collective noses at the previous year.

Obviously not everyone had a lousy year, so your job (before that ball drops in Times Square) is to decide if your thoughts are optimistically honed on 2008 and/or fondly remembering the events of the recent year, or if your thoughts are about regret & distancing oneself from the past year as quickly as possible. For those retro-revelers, I have a suggestion. At the stroke of midnight, while others dance & smooch & stare up at a shower of confetti until some of it gets lodged in their nostrils, you can perform a little ritual that might remove that past year more rapidly from your mind & allow you to go get some confetti up your nose too.

Turn slowly three times. Place your thumbs in your ears. Close your eyes & imagine the past year. Wiggle your fingers. Open your eyes wide & shout "Feh!" Then spit on the floor.

As quickly as possible, go find a hot Conga line & start working on a better year.

Relative Misery

My emotions are on a roller coaster lately. I was to go home today for one blessed week, but the Goddess decided to let it snow let it snow let it snow, making it difficult to catch a plane East. Even if the big birds were taking off, my family has deemed it unfit to travel, so I am grounded. By family, I mean the co-conspirators who keep me imprisoned here. They've recruited a third male to torment me & heighten my misery, the boyfriend. Prince Pepper turned on me by agreeing with them, that travel was unwise. I shrieked things about his mother, his work & his receding hairline for about an hour. I claimed that, if he loved me, he'd be putting together a dog sled team instead of making me more miserable. Yes, it was unreasonable & I will have to call later & be nice & apologetic as all get-out. I did it because I wanted him to be as miserable as I was at that moment, is that so crazy? (only the women answer, please) Just last Thursday I was doing the Snoopy Happy Dance at the thought of one week of autonomy & freedom. When those hopes were dashed, I wanted everyone around me to suffer. It was too dramatic a swing.....from elation to annihilation.

I have been in a constant state of misery, but it varies in degree. Most of the time I just languish & bitch to Buckeye, the cat. A little while ago I ventured out of my room &, for once, no father, no son popping up in front of me with questions. Do you need something? Who are you calling? Why are you holding the big knife? I've considered ordering a stun gun through Amazon. Neither of them was just standing there & staring at me like intrusive owls. I worried they were off plotting something dastardly until I heard the sound of the Browns VS da Bills game on the HD TV in the den. They were guffawing over the nasty weather on the playing field, zero visibility. Around these parts we call that "the Lake Effect." Lake Erie gets blamed for everything. This game, going on as I type, is distracting them from their relentless attention. Therefore, I am free to roam around from room to room like a real adult. For some reason, I feel like either singing into a spatula or spray-painting the walls.

I never thought I would be grateful that a football game was on, but the sight of all those meatheads on the snowy, slushy field in Cleveland is keeping my male captors busy & my misery at a minimal level.

And that is a good thing.

Retraction

It appears that I may have been mistaken about the "chronological regression" last week. All that happened was: a group of Wordsteal members wandered in & Cait showed up, for the first time in ages, on an evening when I had gotten my lips around a bong packed with some Kentucky Kronik. There were several variables that led me to the inevitable conclusion that we had gone back 2 years in time. Let the record show that I am retracting the whole worm hole statement.

The most rambunctious event of last week was the public flogging of poor old Richard/Wordman. The villagers yelled "Kill the monster!" and then lined up to kick him. It was a bloodletting that I will confess was not altogether horrid. I was glad some anonymouse brought up the relentless pm's from the man. I will also confess that some of my dislike stems from the fact that he can beat me 99% of the time. Many of us fear & avoid Table 40. And you just know, after he wins, that he has a smirk. You just know.

We are enjoying the transmigratory Wordstealers who are currently roosting in our Competitive room until their site is healed. Most of them are familiar names, but there are some newbies. I'm hoping they'll become addicted to us & stay. It is so nice having a crowd in the room again.

A Good Old Day Revisited

Last night something extraordinary happened. Our one & only moon was in an interesting house & Uranus must have been aligned with Saturn, or some other sister planet. We may have spent some significant time in a wormhole, one can never be sure. I'm no astrophysicist, so I have no idea what factors coincided last night, allowing us to collectively go back in time. I just know that we were operating a little bit over the rainbow & my mind is trying to find a reason for certain events.

I am not sure what the date was or the month where we landed in the past, because I spent at least 2/3 of the evening in bewilderment that this was actually happening. I was watching a full-blown chronological regression & everyone was just chattering through it. Several hours later, as I watched the sun rise, I calculated that we traveled back approximately two years, to the year 'o5. The memories were wonderful, as I watched us as our former selves....staying up late on a Friday night. Everyone was trying to avoid eye contact with Richard, knowing that one little slip of the tongue could launch him into an instant pm tirade about cheating. Mindi was sickish, but the illness made her hilarious. No one wanted to get into their golf carts & go home, so the Chilly Philly Vamp kept hosting late games. We had a newbie playing & some recentbies.....new growth in our community instead of rotting vines. We often wish for the "good old days" of Synergy & last night, for a couple of hours, we revisited one of those days. It was fabulous.

The memories were great, but they were also bittersweet. The events I was watching just preceded the Barnyard Epidemic of '05. What made me happiest, the vision 2 years ago of that sassy moobawk & her flailing udders once again working the room, also made me saddest because it reminded me that the symptoms would soon overtake our league & ravage our members. Please stop during your days & say a silent prayer for our fallen brothers & sisters, crowing, chirping & quacking out there in cyberspace. And remember: there, but for the grace of good sense, go ye.

I wish I could have just lost my somber thoughts & enjoyed the dance in the past, as many did last night. It did happen, right? I'm not entirely certain that I didn't make the whole thing up. There were 10 players in the Comp Room around midnight? People not only didn't have to be coaxed into signing up for the midnight game, they demanded another after that? And (please tell me this is true) Cait was actually chatting, playing & mooing in the room last night? Did you see all of that too?

I hope it happens again.

Since my foremothers & fathers climbed down out of the trees, into the caves, & eventually out to the suburbs , we have been a matriarchy. The women whose blood gallops through my veins have had strong, forceful personalities. My greatgrandmother, Krazy Kate Doyle, was almost shot by hunters as she rose up from the ground in her fur coat, after sleeping there for several hours. She later told her husband (#4), "It's a good thing I was drunk, I coulda died out there in the cold." Her daughter was the first woman in our county to get a driver's license. As soon as she got it, she threw 3 girlfriends into the car & went to Mardis Gras. I've never claimed they were noble, simply strong-willed.

The men are pampered & petted proudly, but they are also overruled on all major decisions. Since this has always been so, I assumed they were content with the arrangement. I believed that my own father was happy to be left out of the loop. I believed this until recently, when he (at the age of 81) reared up & became a patriarch. And there was my son, Mordred to his King Arthur, beside him, wringing his hands & wheeze-laughing. The two of them took advantage of my long illness & have overturned the family's system. If my daughter wasn't clowning around in Indiana, she could be here shoulder-to-shoulder with me, fighting them back to their easy chairs & complacency; silencing their opinions with brownies. I have one cousin who could also help me with this, but she tends to take after our greatgrandmother & is routinely found sleeping in odd places. She's of no help. I've been here alone & weak, so these men have had to actually opine on some meaty issues. They have tasted the intrinsic satisfaction of decision-making & they want more. They have a weird "I'm in charge" glow in their eyes.

You know & I know that I have been ill. It was necessary to give up some authority due to the nature of my illness, everyone understands that. However, the women who will have that same blood sloshing inside them many generations into the future will have no knowledge of all these details. They will only know me as "that bonehead who lost the matriarchy."

Let's Get Ready to Rumble !!

Welcome, fight fans, to the bout of the year! In one corner: that Steeltown Scrabble maven; tap dancing frogess; wondrous woman of Wordox.....Dorcas! In the other corner: the Sonny Barger of Wordox; Indiana's high-flying, loud squawking, fast drinking crow.....Perrin!

Don't miss this battle, folks, it's just getting to the part where Jeff starts mentioning his own "wedding tackle" & accusing people of having hard-ons for Richard. Please hurry & catch up because they are almost to the part where Jeff's balls come into play. It has only been implied thus far, that he may not have any. Very soon they could start insulting each other's mothers. Dorcas vs Jeff. (read the comments under the Keeping Up post) These are two intelligent, superb players & I expect this battle will be creative & cataclysmic. They are somewhere around their 3rd Round right now. They pulled Richard aka Pompa Zazz into the ring in the 2nd Round & slapped him around a little, through no fault of his own. Toward the end of that round they fell out of their own ring & brawled over to my arena for a quick snipe or two. (see comments on my last post) They fought at the tables with ladder games last night, then continued their mutual assaults back at Jeff's site.

By the end of the night, they were fairly even on my scorecard. Jeff lost some judges' points for not having concrete examples of his declarations, but he gained some ground with a funny stalker analogy. Miss Dorcas had him in a headlock with purported evidence of Richard & Jeff avoiding her on the playing field. She delivered a blistering blow when she introduced homoeroticism into the discussion. Both warriors calmed down & just hurled punctuation at one point (winkies!), but I think they were simply resting up for the next flurry.

The only solution is for them to take this out of the cyberworld & face each other in an actual ring. My money's on Dorcas, she's been working out on the bike lately.

The State of Wordox

Wordox is in a rather sorry state, isn't it? Attendance at tournaments & Interleague is very low & member enthusiasm is all but extinct. There are a few signs of growth & new life. Our RubyNewbie (rubydg) reeled in a new member from across the pond who enjoyed the tourneys so much she determined to have a nap next week so she could stay up & play with us.

Extreme Ox gets a decent turnout most of the time. Over in that neck of the woods Duncansmama is the stalwart oak that we all huddle under for that safe, warm feeling she projects. When things were particularly bad one evening & Wordox was a ghost town, the few players that showed up were fretting about the leagues shutting down. Duncs said (I paraphrase) "As long as I can get into the room, we'll have tournaments." We all felt better.

I lost my EXOX crown to the evil Bluberry. Lately I've been feeling random pains in my legs, shoulders, temple. I suspect she has a Holly Pepper doll somewhere with a bunch of pins in it. She is VoodooBlu. I can't prove this, but the pains did stop after she won the crown back. At one tourney, the TD thanked everyone for registering. I said my usual "thank you for keeping us out of the crack houses." Players laughed, wished each other good luck. Blu said "I'm playing from a crack house." She's evil, but she's funny.

A lot of players are spending their time at WordSteal, but I don't get the attraction. I've dropped in there & the graphics seem rather boring. My partner is raising hell over there & swears it's a thrill ride, I just don't see it.

My beloved Synergy is limping along. Its members don't play there anymore & the TD's have lost all enthusiasm. I really don't know what happened. One moment we were having a rollicking good time, playing Swiss Teams, Masquerades, Bawdy Ox; the next moment we were looking at one possible tournament a day & no players. If it wasn't also happening to other leagues, I would blame the Barnyard Epidemic of '05. We lost a lot of members in that one. Sometimes you can still hear one of them out there, quacking in the dark.

Here's hoping things pick up soon! :::clink:::