Somedays, even wearing the lucky rocket ship underwear doesn't help

People who've made the mistake of letting me talk about Scrabble know that I get a huge kick out of many of the words that are legal in tournament play, particularly transliterated Hebrew/Yiddish words (TREF, TEREFAH, BRIS, MITZVAH, MIKVAH, MILCHIG, MOHEL/ MOHALIM, TEFILLIN, TALLIS/ TALLIT/ TALLITH/ TALLAISIM/ TALEYSIM/ TALLISIM/ TALLITHES/ TALLITHIM/ TALLITIM/ TALLITOTH - all legal; I'm not even going to try to list all of the legal variants of "matzah"). This week is quickly turning into one where I understand why AARGH, AARRGH, and AARRGHH are all legal.

Starting with the good stuff. Got to see our beautiful and perfect-in-every-way niece over the weekend (I think we spoke to my sister and brother-in-law too somewhere along the way), and catch David again at an NBN seminar. Since then, life seems determined to do one of these on me:


(and no, "AAUGH" is not a legal Scrabble word, although I think that I'm going to ask the NSA to include it in the next dictionary)

First came the word that I needed to do some overtime work at the office. No biggie, and hey, a few extra bucks to help pay off the upcoming tax hit is always a nice thing, right? Yeah, now try pulling four consecutive 16-hour days alternating between 7am-11pm and 11pm-3pm. The extra money? Heck, that's gonna go straight to whatever makeup gift I have to give The Lovely Wife(tm) for not being around all week (and I'm sorry, honey, but it doesn't quite cover a trip to Hawaii). Thesis research? Um, sure... would you trust someone who just worked 16 hours on 4 hours' sleep to run reactions with chemicals that are simultaneously explosive and carcinogenic? I didn't think so.

Email inbox: the Mac mini that we ordered two weeks ago finally shipped via FedEx! Cool! So I'll be seeing it tomorrow! Let's check the tracking... the package just left "Shenzhen, CN"... what state is "CN?" Oh, wait... never mind...

Oh, and the joys of trying to contact the Israeli consulate by phone are few and far-between, let me tell you... just about the only good thing, in fact, was finding the morfix milon, an online Hebrew-English dictionary, which helps immensely when trying to remember just how you say "consulate" in Hebrew ("consulia," for those who care).