scary with a side of speed scrabble

so, yesterday afternoon.
It's 530.
I leave work.
I stop by food lion to buy spinach.

I go home.
I park, gather my belongings, take them inside.
I turn off the alarm, turn on the lights, put the spinach in the fridge.
I gather the trash I neglected to take out in the morning, along with the recycling, and walk the couple hundred feet or less to the dumpster.
I deposit said items and return from whence I came.
On the way back I think, “y’know, it probably would have been a good idea to lock the door.
Oh well.

I reach our apartment, go inside, shut the door and promptly begin screaming.
Combined with crying.
And gasping for breath.
Because a large figure has just come towards me from behind the door.

....!!!!.....

I notice that this figure looks a lot like Otto....
AND IS OTTO.
Who has just tried to kill me for the second time during the month of April.

He was quite proud of himself for the millisecond it took for him to notice that I was 1)crying and 2)shaking.

It took a little bit for me to stop crying and even longer to stop the shaking. As it turned out, Otto had come home a day early, and had arrived at our apartment in time to surprise me. And boy, did he. At first he’d hid upstairs, but his plans were foiled when I took the garbage out. So he came down and hid behind the hinge-side of the door. I think I would have been okay if he had just stepped out and said “boo!” Or “hi Carrie.” Etc. But the coming at me was what did it. Man, oh, man.

Needless to say, I got mint chocolate chip icecream and earthfare chocolate milk out of the deal, so we’re even-ish. And I felt much better after wine, spaghetti, wine, pesto bread, wine, chocolate, wine and speed scrabble with the girls. Oh, and speed scrabble? Awesome. And bear in mind that Scrabble is one of my top five favorite games of all time (along with spades, gin, fandango and pente), so it's saying a lot that I'm willing to entertain the notion that there's more than one way to play a game of scrabble.

Instructions: for two or more players (three is better than two, methinks). With five or more players you need two sets of scrabble tiles. Empty tiles out onto a table, letter side down. Put board and letter holders back in the box, as you won’t need them. Each player draws seven tiles and keeps them face-down until someone says “go.” Arrange your seven tiles into words like you would on a scrabble board (so they have to intersect or whatever). The first player to assemble their tiles says ,”go” and ALL players grab another tile—now you all have eight. Repeat. You can re-arrange your letters however and whenever you want during the game, so that you can use all of your tiles. Once all the tiles are drawn (or the number leftover is not a multiple of the number of players) the play ends when someone successfully uses all of their tiles and says, “go.” Then you count up your points like you would in real scrabble, subtracting any unused tiles from your total score. Play again and again, adding up the points or not. However you like. The beauty is in the speed of the game, since sometimes real scrabble can be tiresome. Of course, you still want to form the highest point words you can, so there’s skill in it too. We had fun.