Word Widdershins

My head is spinning with words tonight after spending more time than I care to admit to playing a word game my sister introduced me to about 3Am this morning. I was intending to use my session last night to finish getting my TT prepared so that I could post it early for a change. My sister sent me the link to Word Jong at Real Arcade in an IM. She knows I love word games and she knows I love mahjong tile games. This combines the two concepts. I know better than to start playing a word game or a solitaire game when I have urgent tasks to attend to. But the temptation was just too great. I thought it wouldn't hurt to play for an hour. Ha! next thing I knew it was five minutes to five and time to get my laptop workstation packed up to move back to the bedroom. Time to make the coffee for my husband and wake him up.

Once I got settled in the bedroom again, I kept on playing. And kept on playing. And kept on playing. I noticed the room go from dark to dim to bright. My husband came in for his shower supplies at seven. I was still playing. He came back to get dressed. I played on. He left and I played on....and on....and on. I knew I needed to quit but I kept on playing. The last time I let this happen to me was shortly after we got WIFI and I discovered the game Bookworm and got lost in it for most of the next twenty hours with a short nap for a break. Nothing like being able to leave a game that is dependent on being online on indefinitely. Addictive game plus no time limits. Not a good combination for someone with the difficulty in switching gears that I have. I was so afraid of it happening again, I haven't been back to Bookworm since.

Word Jong has two things in common with Bookworm that make it especially conducive to the addition predilection. There are no natural breaks and no time limits. Which means there were no natural boundries. In Bookworm, there was no time limit governing the input of a word and as long as you kept the burning tiles from reaching the bottom you stayed alive. Burning tiles were introduced at the top whenever you made words under five letters long. With Word Jong there was a natural end to a board but clicking the OK on the scoreboard started a new board. Once that new board is in front of my eyes I'm seeing words and I have to make them.

Meanwhile I still don't have my TT put together. I got lost in the research for it for most of the last two weeks. I was intending to have it ready for last Thursday and it was preempted by the loss of my browser bookmarks when my laptop power cord gave up the ghost last Wednesday night right abou this time. The theme of the TT was to be free ebooks online. It isn't that I don't have 13 links. No there are probably three or four times that many but I haven't kept them organized according to most useful and I had hoped to write brief (as in 25-50 words) reviews of each one I listed. I may have to just do a simple linked list and let it go at that. Even so, I'm not sure I can get it posted before I have to sleep. I got only about two hours, if that, this afternoon.

Meanwhile, due to the obsession with hunting for reading resources online over the past two weeks and then that silly word game last night--I have fallen way behind in my effort to match my husband's record for reading all 13 of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events in a single week. I started the first one last Thursday evening. I should be starting book twelve by now but instead have just started book seven after dinner this evening while my husband was using the laptop.

After he gave up the laptop and started getting ready for bed, that was my cue to pack up and leave the room. But because, I am so sleep deprived and feel like I'm going to just zonk out over the keyboard at any second, I thought it wasn't worth it to move out there, that it would be better for me to just sleep now and get up in the morning with my husband and work on TT while doing laundry like I did last week when I was forced to use the PC for it.

So I was about to settle down with Book Seven: A Vile Village to read until sleep overtook me when I remembered that I hadn't done a post for Wednesday yet. I have an unbroken streak of posting every day that is closing in on three straight weeks. 21 days is a benchmark for habit setting. 21-28 days is how long it takes to create a new habit or replace a bad habit with a healthy one. I couldn't let posting slide. But after having been reading for three straight hours it was as difficult to put the book down as it was to stop playing the game.

For TTers looking for my TT: watch for it noonish tomorrow. I have to sleep.