Our Daily Spelling Bee

 Every morning, we open the NYT games site on our respective iPhones and do Spelling Bee.  Jim is kind enough to stop finding words at whatever point I stop.  He is definitely better at this game than I am and apart from seeing more words, he is better at finding the pangram—the word that uses all seven letters of the grid.  Today’s pangram was “hickory.”  Exactly seven letters. Sometimes the words are longer with duplicate letters.

Today I was amused to see the record the NYT has kept of our playing this game.  We have done 694 puzzles in which we achieved “Queen Bee” only 87 times—finding all possible words.  We almost always play until we reach “Genius” which is a percentage of possible answers.  We do what we can without hints but almost always go to the table of hints that gives us the first two letters of words and tells how many words there are with those initial two letters.

Is this a waste of time?  Probably, but we have time to waste in our retirement and it is a challenge for us.  I look forward to opening that game each morning, usually while drinking my coffee.  It is an activity that we do together.  We do learn new words sometimes of very little value however.  “Nene” is a bird; ”philhellenic”  is just esoteric.  We have learned to look out for three ways to spell one’s mother (momma, mama, and mamma) and to remember the often present “açaí” and if that is there, look our for “acacia” too.  

There is an active group on Facebook that complains often about the editor’s choices of words.  I posted once on that site when our local Dollar Tree had quite the display of bee-themed merchandise.  I didn’t buy anything but I had a lot of  “likes” on Facebook from the “Hive.” 

A Diamond and a Celebration

 

We were asked to save the date so we knew something good was going to happen.  But we didn’t know any details. 

There were 13 of us at dinner—hosted by Eli at Roots Ocean Prime in Princeton—adjacent to the Princeton University campus.  Eli included parents, siblings, Jim and me and Grandma from NYC.  We had a delicious dinner and got to admire the sparkling diamond on Katie’s hand.  The proposal took place at Plainsboro Preserve, a place that we have walked many times too.  

Now they will be off to Winston-Salem where Katie will be an assistant professor of teaching at Wake Forest University.  The wedding may be in the summer of 2026–a long time off!  

We are very happy for this wonderful couple—and they are very happy too!

June 9. A postscript:  Rogers (sitting between Jim and me) has tested positive for Covid!  We ordered up to date tests from Amazon—the ones in the closet were badly outdated—and they have already arrived.  Now we hope to be symptom free and disease free—ten days incubation period we read.  

June 15. 

After feeling like I was fighting a cold, with Jim’s help and the video of instruction, I did a Covid test and with the great drama of waiting 15 minutes, it was negative!  Hooray!  It’s strange how uneasy knowing that you have been exposed to someone who tested positive and waiting to see if you too are infected.  But so far we are OK!  Off to Jeff and Susan’s this afternoon to celebrate Father’s Day!

No WiFi

 Yesterday our Wi-Fi went out at about 4 PM and with some difficulty we connected with the Xfinity app and they kept postponing the time that it would be reconnected. Eventually it was connected at about 4 AM but I am still having trouble accessing things on my iPad, so I am writing this blog on my phone.

It was really enlightening to realize how much we depended on our Wi-Fi. We missed doing the New York Times puzzle together during our happy hour we could not watch any sports and at 10 PM Jim had to check the Mets score on his phone.

I found a book to read or to reread, and I think Jim was reading too, but we certainly did miss our Wi-Fi.

———Hours later—It wasn’t the end of the story.  Xfinity said it was connected but our devices said there was no internet.  Jim communicated with Xfinity via the app and they reset the Gateway device and it appears to be working—knock on wood!