We’re having a family game night here in the Burt house, and I’m composing this post as I wait for Mr. Burt to make his third move in our Scrabble game.  Which began just about two hours ago.  (Oh!  He actually played!  And now I have quickly spelled my fourth word, so am now waiting on him to spell his fourth word.)

Though I’ve been playing Scrabble continuously for about three years with friends on Facebook, it’s been almost that long since I’ve played a game of actual Scrabble with my husband.  I’d forgotten what it’s like to sit and wait in real time for an opponent to make a move.  And Mr. Burt is, perhaps, the most agonizingly slow Scrabble player who ever lived.  He cannot be satisfied unless he lays down a high-point letter on a double or triple letter score tile and gets a double or triple word score, too.  Hence, four moves in two hours. Sounds boring, doesn’t it?  You’d be surprised.  There’s never a dull moment when the conversations go like this:

Mr. Burt:  “Is xenit a word?”

LR:  “No.”

Mr. Burt:  “It seems like it should be.”

LR:  “Why, because you want it to be a word?”

Mr. Burt:  “Look it up.”

Mind you, the whole time Mr. Burt was going on about xenit and axetin and xarent and tintax and a number of other made-up words, not all of which were appropriate for all audiences, he could have played extra, for a respectable twenty points.  After about forty minutes had elapsed in his turn, I finally cried out, in exasperation, “Just settle for extra already!”

To which Mr. Burt replied, “I’m not going to settle.”

“You have to settle!” I retorted.   “Sometimes you have no choice but to settle!”

Mr. Burt maintained his cool.  “I never settle.  How would you have liked it if I’d just settled for some ugly girl at Baylor?  But I didn’t settle, I waited, and I found you.”

I suppose I ought to have been melted by this, but despite my love of BBC costume dramas, I’m not particularly romantic.  “You didn’t find me.  I found you on that stupid college dating website you’d forgotten all about!  I contacted you!”

Mr. Burt sheepishly laid down extra and took his twenty points.

Actually, that is a lie.  Mr. Burt realized that if he played extra, it would leave a double word score and a triple word score square open for me.  So he played rex.  (Which, interestingly, in addition to a king, also means “an animal with a single wavy layer of hair.”)