Keeping sort of humble

It's always an education to play word games with my friends and relatives. Words are a big part of my job, but I often lose Scrabble to Jane, or Boggle to Casey, or Quiddler to somebody else.

Still, it's fun being challenged to come up with words that fit combinations of letters, and it's a real triumph to come up with something that uses difficult letters such as J or X. I lost games at Christmas and Thanksgiving, and an earlier trip to Raleigh visiting friends, and still enjoyed them very much.

For the record: A quire is a quantity of paper, and it can also be used as a verb.

Also, although Merriam-Webster defines ley as a mere variant of lea, or meadow, and leaves it at that, it also has some more substantial definitions: Collins via The Free Dictionary says it's 1) grassland or pasture or 2) "a line joining two prominent points in the landscape, thought to be the line of a prehistoric track." Dictionary.com adds that ley is "a pewter containing about 80 percent tin and 20 percent lead." Finally, here's a Wikipedia entry about ley lines, both as old travelers' tracks and in the newer mystical interpretation.