A scintilla of what I've been up to

So, if you read Liz's blog recently, you will know that the B²ME club (Ben, Ben, Marae, and Elise) went to the Jensen's house to eat dinner and play games. One of the games we played was Boggle.

The object of the game is quite simple—each player searches for words that can be constructed from the letters of sequentially adjacent cubes, where "adjacent" cubes are those horizontally, vertically or diagonally neighboring. Words must be at least three letters long, may include singular and plural (or other derived forms) separately, but may not use the same letter cube more than once per word. Each player records all the words he or she finds by writing on a private sheet of paper. After three minutes have elapsed, all players must stop writing and the game enters the scoring phase.
In the scoring phase, each player reads off his or her list of discovered words. If two or more players wrote the same word, it is removed from all players' lists. For all words remaining after duplicates have been eliminated, points are awarded based on the length of the word. The winner is the player whose point total is highest.

Marae ended up winning the game, so I have decided to improve and increase my vocabulary. Not only should this help me in Boggle, but it has been shown that if you know a lot of words it makes you sound smarter. Or, as I always say, a capaciously commodious lexicon propagates a presupposition of perspicaciousness propitious to the confabulator.

To help me in this endeavor, I have decided to utilize Dictionary.com's "word of the day" feature. Each day a new word is featured along with its definition, origin, and usage examples. Today's word is "scintilla".

scintilla \sin-TIL-uh\, noun: A tiny or scarcely detectable amount; the slightest particle; a trace; a spark.

Since doing this, my Boggle skills have improved. With a cursory glance at the above Boggle grid I found:

crackers, accusers, suckers, sounder, resound, rackers, huskers, duckers, dackers, cracker, accuses, accuser, sunder, sucres, sucker, soucar, racker, onuses, nouses, husker, ducker, dacker, cracks, accuse, users, under, suers, sucre, sucks, sound, sonde, snuck, racks, nukes, nuder, noses, husks, hucks, dusks, dukes, ducks, cusks, crack, cared, cadre, arcus, acres, acred, uses, user, sues, suer, suck, rhus, rare, rack, onus, nuke, nude, nous, nose, husk, huns, hues, huck, herd, dusk, duos, duns, duke, dues, duck, dare, cusk, cues, care, card, cade, acre, use, sun, sue, sud, sou, son, ser, res, red, rad, oud, nus, nos, hun, hue, her, era, edh, duo, dun, due, cue, cud, car, cad, are, arc, and ade.

131 words worth 215 points, not too bad. Or, should I say, not even a scintilla of...badness.

On a completely different but not completely unrelated note, when we went out to Liz & Ryan's house I returned the bin of LEGOs I had borrowed from Davy and Danny. I had been using them to try out some stop motion animation—where you set up a scene, take a picture, change the scene slightly, take another picture, and continue that sequence until you have hundreds of pictures that, when viewed in rapid succession, create the illusion of movement. Here are a couple of brief examples:

Anyway, that's about it for now. Gratchiss for reading my blog. Be sure to answer the poll question.

(Results from "Favorite Craig Nickname" poll: C.R. C.R. da yoof uh da nayshin=50%, Fatboy=37%, Lover Boy=13%)