Sometimes you just have to save yourself

I'll see if Kristen remembers this story.

When we were in college our senior year we lived in a pretty crappy apartment that was cold and drafty and we had a little mouse problem. The mighty Poopus was on the case and cornered a mouse in the kitchen.

K was upstairs - I think in the shower or something - and I saw the mouse, the cat and basically started to flip out. K heard me screaming and blazed downstairs in her bathrobe to see what was going on.

She screamed, I screamed the cat was like, "What?" - that's when we realized that nobody was going to do anything about the mouse and that we'd have to deal with it ourselves. Kristen tried to distract the cat. I grabbed our other roommate's winter glove and gently pried the mouse out of the cat's clutches and flung the offending mouse out the back door.

She went up to get dressed, I washed my hand about 3 million times and we never spoke of the incident again.... 'cause that's what roommates do.

On Scrabble… and other stuff

I don’t really play Scrabble. I’m not a huge fan. But sometimes events conspire against me.

My college roommate and friend of more than a decade, Kristen, was (and I believe still is) a huge Scrabble fan. We were excellent roommates. Or rather, she was an excellent roommate. I’m not really sure what I brought to the table.

I thought of K when I came across Stefan Fatsis’ funny book Word Freak which covers his efforts to become a world-class Scrabble player.

Scrabble was the source of one of very few fights*. We were playing Scrabble at her house one day and I wasn’t really into it. But Kristen was very competitive and sensed that I wasn’t especially interested. This … I might say infuriated her. Since she's coming to my house soon, I'll leave out any foggy recollections I may have had. Let's just say tempers flared and words were exchanged.

And that was the last time we played Scrabble.

* For those who care - our other fight was the awful incident involving Christmas. She’d decorated our apartment with all kinds of festive lights for the holidays. I came home from working (possibly all night) at the newspaper and sat down on the couch, exhausted. I chatted with her for a few minutes, but didn’t comment on the decorations. I don’t think I’d really noticed.

She was unhappy.

Then we bickered like an old married couple and stopped in the middle of our fight when we realized K had become like my wife and I had become like her loutish husband. So we decided that we should go find some boys to hang around with or something.