Scrabble Me Please

Do you know how hard it is to make any decent word when four out of the seven letters you have are I's? I do. And I found this out the hard way last night when I played Scrabble for the very first time.
What?
Yes, I am 28 years old, I pride myself with my lexicon and I love board games, but for some reason this game was one that I had never played! Even so, I have heard so much about it that I wanted to try it anyways so I picked up a cheap version at the store the other day and waited for the perfect time to break it out.

Staring at my letters, willing a word to come out of six vowels and one consonant.. while he simply adds an S to a previous word for easy points. Tsk.

For quite some time our scores were neck in neck. He'd get 15 points, I'd get 10, He'd get 7 points, I'd get 12.. then my letter rack filled with I's and my scores went down to 4, 3 even 2..
Towards the end of the game, his score now 20 points above mine, I only needed one letter, an I (ironically), to have a 66 point word to steal the game..
He wistfully said "if only I had a T..." to which I replied "if only I had an I..."
He looked at me, calculatively.
"Wanna trade?"
I looked at the board. Chances of him using the letter I was going to use were very slim, being that Q generally needs a U to make any legitimate word. There are four total, two were on the board, one was in my hand. No, he doesn't have one I thought.
"Oh yeah I'll trade you" I said, eagerly.
But what does he do?
Not only did I give him a good letter, but he used it to get a 37 point word in the space that I was planning on using, rendering the trade useless for me. Never again! (even if it did have us rolling on the floor laughing)
By the end I lost by 3 points. Something that I'm not particularly proud of, but with the standard being best two out of three, who knows what will happen next time ;)

Testing A Quiz - Geography

This is a very easy quiz I created for a competition website that I like to go to from time to time... this post is just a test to see if the embedding works. So.. feel free to take the super easy test if you'd like! :)

Love Postcards? Try PostCrossing!

Anyone that knows me knows I have a love of post cards. Whenever I go anywhere (outside of my own state of course) I make sure to pick up a few postcards that capture the area that I had been exploring. Whenever a friend goes on a vacation to somewhere new I always ask for them to bring me back some post cards which is most often well received because out of all the things that I could ask for, post cards have got to be the least expensive (and yes, it even beats shells from the beach because honestly, sometimes you just cannot find any good ones and who wants to spend their whole vacation scouring the beaches for a good shell?).
I was proclaiming my love of post cards on Twitter a couple of weeks ago when one of my friends told me about a little site called PostCrossing. This is a place where you can go and sign up to get postcards from around the world sent to you. The only catch is that you have to send some first! That's right, completely free (aside from the $0.90 international post card postage rate), very interesting and after finally sending out the five cards that I agreed to send out (the snow storm has kept me from going to the post office for over a week now) I can wait and see what shows up in my mail box :)

So far I have sent cards describing the Pacific Northwest to Finland, Tawain, Germany, and Estonia (if you are doing the math I actually got two different people from Finland). Anyone want a postcard? Let me know!

Some of my favorite emoticons (will be updated)