Last Friday evening we played Scrabble, but this time we put some stipulations to it.

We went to The Oceanic on Saturday with Amy and Ben. The wait was long, but it was beautiful outside. The water was a perfect temperature, so we walked in that a little bit. Then we went and sat out on the pier and (Ben and I at least, which is a little funny) watched a terrific sunset.

The week at work was stressful. Josh switched things to a new server, and there were a lot of little issues because of it.

On Tuesday we watched the first two episodes of Over There that I had DVRed. I’m enjoying the show. We decided not to watch it when it came on on Wednesday though, because we thought it would make Sarah think of her father, who is over in Iraq. So we watched it Thursday. Amanda called her dad to tell him about it, and he said he’d heard it was a biased view of the war, which Amanda and I both disagree with. He probably would like it.

Michael and Sarah came on Wednesday night. They’d gone to dinner on a sunset cruise on the Cape Fear and stayed here afterwards. We played (guess it…) Scrabble. Amanda blew us away. We played the next day too, and in Sarah’s first turn she dropped all seven letters to spell “SLEEPING.” We were all duly impressed until Amanda dropped all seven of hers to spell “TEMPTED” intersecting it with a couple other words and got her 80-some points.

Amanda picked up Tiger Woods 2005 for Xbox when she went to Wal-Mart to get some things before Michael and Sarah came by. She also picked up the soundtrack for Phantom of the Opera, which I’d just told her I planned on getting for her soon. Anyway, Michael, Sarah and I got Amanda to play and she actually enjoyed it. We played a course this morning and she actually beat me by four strokes. She had some great chips and a few other really good shots. Plus she’s pretty good at the putting.

We played (yeah, you guessed it again) Scrabble again last night and Amanda completely demoralized me.

In the news this week, a woman shot some cops who were escorting her husband from a courthouse in, I believe, Tennessee, then they ran off. They were caught a couple days later with help from a tip called in by a taxi driver who’d driven them to Ohio or some such. He was being interviewed on MSNBC, and he seemed like a pretty nice guy. He didn’t seem to want a whole lot of attention and was just a normal early-thirties gaming geek. He’d been playing Siphon Filter when a friend told him about the people and he realized they’d been in his taxi.

Natalee Holloway is still missing in Aruba. The general consensus of me and the people I’ve talked to (Amanda and Jason, namely) figure she was out partying too hard with those rich kids they’ve been questioning, something went wrong.

A deadly week in Iraq. I pray everyday for the troops.