“Remoted” – Day 83 (Sunday)

Sad news.

After waking me up this morning to go out to potty at 1:30, 4:00, and 6:00, Moose finally let me sleep all the way until 7:00. I finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns with my coffee. Unfortunately, this was the long-dreaded weekend of reckoning when Facebook Scrabble disappeared. I went to bed Friday night with several games in process and great words planned for some of my next turns but Saturday it was nothing but the dreaded bye-bye message.

My morning routine and my evening escape for most of the past many years (eight? ten? who knows) has been the Facebook online Scrabble game. Online Scrabble was my diversion from the stress of life inside my own head and outside the BungaLowell in the real world.

Now the only option is Scrabble GO, a pain in the butt miniature board sized for a phone screen even when viewed on a laptop. It’s hard to move the letters, the board randomly zooms in and out when trying to place letters, and overall, I give it a FAIL. Well, I would give it an official fail if the button to “Give Feedback about App” actually allowed genuine feedback instead of predefined radio button options fitting a narrow range of comments, none of which are, “This version of the game sucks” or “Why did you destroy a good thing?”

Without my beloved Scrabble, my favorite game in real life for decades and online for ages, I have been lost. It was not without warning, and during the months of notices that the game would be ending, there was denial. There was the hope they would decide to not stop the game after all. Now there was the eventual settling on a lesser option. After five, maybe six years of avoidance, Candy Crush Saga, which came pre-loaded on the replacement phone, along with two other Candy Crush games (Friends? Soda? What the heck?) and five or six other games which have since been deleted, was opened. There is something addictive about Candy Crush Saga and the game music. It was a hard habit to break several years ago, and now, I’m sucked back in. Last night saw a solid hour of Candy Crush in bed before sleeping. I woke up with the theme music playing in my head.

The story of 2020.

Today, the reality of the void of no Scrabble continued with a swirl of feelings that are actually more related to current real life events happening in the country than the stupid game. There is just less opportunity to ignore the real world without the Scrabble diversion. There was stress. Anger. Fatigue. Depression. It wore me out. When there were “No lives left” in Candy Crush I did the only reasonable thing to avoid all the thinking and feeling. I took a nap. Not a thirty minute refreshing nap. Oh no, it turned out to be a three hour slumber, broken once by Moose’s demands to go out, and finally by his incessant yapping for dinner. Meanwhile, Winston (aka “The Good One”) was napping on the floor and being, well, the good one.

Once fully awakened, it was time to prepare supper for all the creatures in the house. Kibble was measured for the dogs, veggies were sauteed in olive oil for the human. Luckily, the timer had run on Candy Crush and I could play again, which unfortunately, didn’t last long before there was no life again. That is the cruelty of Candy Crush and sections labeled “Nightmarishly Hard Level.” That may be the perfect tagline for 2020 – “Nightmarishly Hard Level.”