Through the glass ceiling

Bing image left, Powerpoint fill pattern right

Searching the blog for 'scrabble' suggests that the struggle to break through to a score of 600 had not succeeded; not succeeded to the extent that achieving 550 was noteworthy. The nearest we had come to 600 appears to be the game played after a visit to the chip shop at Horton Retail, back in September and noticed at reference 1.

Then yesterday evening, there being nothing we thought watchable on Freeview, we finally made it, with my scoring 322 and BH 282. I incurred a penalty of one point, holding just the one vowel when she went out. But not enough to deprive me of my victory and not affecting the total of 604.

Both victories were made possible by my drawing both blank tiles at more or less the same time, about a third of the way through the game, which meant, after some whirring in the brain, that I was able to make 'awakened', with the opening 'a' on a triple word and the second 'e' hitched onto the 'd' which was already there. 33 for the triple word - depressed by the two non-scoring blanks - plus 50 for using all seven of my tiles making 83, a significant part of my eventual total.

Paid for in part by scoring a meagre 4 on my previous turn, needing to conserve a possibly winning hand against the possibility of consummation. A possibility which was, in the event, realised.

Perhaps the second time I have done such a thing since the start of lock-downs. How long before the next breach of the 600 barrier?

PS: scored on the back of an envelope donated by the Salvation Army. Sadly, the Army saw fit to have one of those small patterns in blue printed on the inside of the envelope, which precluded further scoring there today, which would have irritated FIL had he still been around. The image above is the best that I could do by way of reproducing the pattern, somewhere between left and right - and I remember that HSBC used to something of the sort to disguise handwriting, but I forget quite what the context was now. OneDrive sulking again, so I didn't want to take a picture of the inside of the envelope itself, now recycled.

Reference 1: psmv4: Return to the court.