Scrabble recap

So I walked into Old Brick a few minutes before Saturday's Free the Clinic Scrabble tournament, ready for my big showdown with Iowa City Press-Citizen Opinion Page Editor Jeff Charis-Carlson.

We'd placed a friendly little wager on the game a few days before and I was feeling pretty confident (Hey, who says a lady can't be cocky and irrationally competitive?).

But my game face was for nothing -- pairings were random and Carlson and I didn't play each other. We figured out how to honor the bet anyway, but more on that in a minute.

Round one was with Jean, whose Scrabble philosophy is similar to mine: Try hard, but don't have a heart attack about it. Negotiate acceptable words instead of challenging. It is a game, after all, if a competitive one, and it should be fun. Fun we had.

It helped that I had a very lucky game. Jean's just a warmhearted person with a healthy perspective.

Next round, I was paired up with Caroline, and the tiles didn't fall quite so favorably. In fact, our opening moves were comically crummy, and not because we didn't try. You could practically hear the gears working as we struggled with the tiles we'd been dealt. But we wouldn't cave! We played on.

Sometimes the best you can do is "tug" and "fun" -- fitting first words for that second game, which we plowed through with good humor and a new-found appreciation for vowels.

By round three I was so beat I felt lucky to remember how to spell my own name. Then my opponent and I got to talking about the state of journalism (Her son is studying the biz. She's worried. Can you blame her?), which, as Carlson and I later agreed, is probably the single best way to throw a reporter off her game.

So at the end of the tournament, when we compared our composite scores, Carlson had me beat. I kicked in the extra $20 donation to the clinic.

And I should note that local gadfly Gary Sanders (who -- I promised to mention here -- is single, ladies) blew us both out of the water. But the real winner was the Free Medical Clinic, which raised more than $3,200 to help pay off the mortgage.

Yes, fine, and Carlson.

This time.