Category: Family life

I confess that Bill and I share a teeny weeny addiction. It’s to a word-game called Perquackey that we’ve been playing a couple of rounds of, oh, just about every evening for the past four years on which we’ve both been together.
Yes, of course we played most evenings when we were traveling together in Europe in the summer. And when I was traveling in Palestine in March, Bill rigged a webcam over the playing table so we could play transcontinentally via Skype… I’m afraid our fondness for the game is that bad.
Most people play Perquackey with a 3-minute timer for each round. But we long ago decided that was too slow. So we play with a one-minute timer from another game-box, which makes the game go much faster and builds the adrenalin better.
Not that we’re competitive about this, you understand.
So why am I sharing this dark family secret with you right now? Because this evening I got my best score ever, that’s why! 4,200 points in one 60-second round. If you’ve ever played one-minute Perquackey you might understand how elated I felt about that. (The ace in the hole there was the word “floorings”, which with 9 letters gave me 1,000 points.)
In case you want to know more fascinating details about how we play, here they are: We use the 1974 Lakeside edition of the game which is better than the later, tin-box “Cardinal Industries” edition in a number of ways. And we use the Scrabble dictionary as our absolute go-to “Bible” on the admissibility of words. Since Bill grew up American and I grew up British, we had to have a neutral arbiter for this; and this, with all its faults, is what we chose.
4,500 here I come…

We were planning a pretty quiet Christmas, having had all the kids and their signifcant others here for Thanksgiving. We were thinking it would just be Bill, me, and our youngest, Lorna.
On December 24 I was just finishing writing this JWN post when who should come clattering up the stairs to my office but my elder daughter and her husband, who had just made the 7-hour drive from New York to come here for a surprise visit. How fabulous! We spent three days luxuriating in being together.
Saturday evening we had some good friends over and played some excellent rounds of charades after dinner. Sunday, the five of us opened our presents under the tree … I dashed off alone to Quaker meeting, which was a good one… we all spent a bunch of time cooking together and eating. (One vegetarian, two fishetarians, two carnivores… the food just piles up.)
We also spent a bunch of time doing crosswords (the daughters), competing at cut-throat Perquackey (Bill and I), and playing a little more gently a couple of good free-form Scrabble variants that we all enjoy. I think we all prefer the free-form variants over the real thing at this point. Real Scrabble just feels too darn ponderous.
I even decided to put good instructions for them over at Wikipedia. Here and here.

Tomorrow, Bill and I are leaving early to go to New York for the weekend. While there we’ll have some good time with the daughters and the son-in-law. Maybe I’m a sentimentalist but I really value the time I get to spend with my kids, my sisters, and other family members… Perhaps the fact that we’re all so broadly scattered makes the times we do get to spend together even more special.
When we have good family time together, however, I’m always acutely aware of the terrible pain that travel restrictions and visa restrictions put on families not as lucky as ours… For Palestinian or Iraqi families right now– a high proportion of whom have family members scattered in different countries– weddings, funerals, and other events that rightly ought to be occasions for a big family get-together instead become reminders of loss and separation.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Faiza and her son Khalid. I’ve heard no news yet about whether Kahlid’s still in prison… Hope and prayers for both of you… and for political prisoners everywhere.