Final Fearsome Foursome (featuring flamboyant friperry...)

Sorry about the title. Alliteration: awesomely awful or awfully awesome? Inquiring minds want to know... So there are a few remaining regulars that deserve their own description. Lets start with Candace. Forget ex-military, she is current, been to Iraq and back, was on the televised scrabble championship and is not impressed by your play. Apparently, end game time pressure is not as distracting as live gunfire either. We appear to be evenly matched ability wise (aside from the fact that she could snap my neck should she choose to be a poor sport). The minor distraction of a multiple child household seems to be all that stands in the way of complete scrabble mastery and subsequent world domination.

Regina is both a great start for a bingo (play that uses all seven tiles) and a very nice person who also frequents Panera. She is somehow involved in Academia at the local University, but I can never quite figure out how. I think she said was a lady and visiting professor or maybe it was lady of the evening that visits professors. Anyhow, she shares my frustration over the vagaries of language and specifically how words from great literature such as Hamlet and Ulysses has somehow escaped inclusion on the acceptable word list for scrabble while such wonders as youse and tup made the cut. She is either kind enough or degenerate enough (depending on your perspective) to laugh at my "jokes" so she's ok in my book.

Speaking of books, way back in the second post I introduced Kathy with a K (not to be confused with Cathy with a C). So umm, Cathy with a C also comes to Panera and should not be confused with Kathy with a K. This Cathy is training to be a nurse which should come in handy when the inevitable bloodshed from our powderkeg of personalities finally boils over into a physical conflagration. (I don't usually do asides, but reading back over this post and particularly this sentence, I have no idea what I was actually saying. Can a powderkeg boil? If it did boil, how would that induce bloodshed? Is there such a thing as a non physical conflagration? Did I mean confrontation? Maybe three in the morning was not the best time to try to write. End ridiculously long aside.) Its my understanding that Peggy recruited Cathy through her job teaching nurses, but the timing was such that she was told to join after grades were submitted. Seems fishy to me, but maybe I am just jealous I have not had any students good enough at scrabble that I have wanted to coerce them into joining our eclectic ensemble. Whatever the circumstances that brought Cathy with a C to us and whether or not she disappears once Peggy can no longer go back and edit her grade, it is still nice to have her.

As may or may not have become apparent, the majority of the members have ties to one of three areas. The university, the military, and medicine. It seems fitting then, to close my description of the "main" members with Galen who spans all these worlds and many more. She is (I kid you not) an ex drill sergeant who worked as a therapist in suicide prevention before leaving to start a job teaching for the university. All roads may lead to Rome, but I think most of them make a pit stop at Galen. Galen is different even for a scrabble player. She frequently serenades her opponents with the eternal question "Don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?" If no answer is forthcoming, time and topics may pass only to culminate eventually with the solemn and almost wistful " Don't cha?" Random whistles and curses also punctuate most of her turns, much like a parrot that has been left overnight in front of HBO. The important thing to remember about Galen though is this: she has a pool and an outdoor grill. If "freak like me" means relaxing swimming and delicious burgers then yes Galen, now and forever, in response to your heart's one question, my answer is wholeheartedly yes.