Last night, ramonarjona and I went to the last-ever qualifying Seattle Spelling Bee at the Re-bar before the final contest in April. He provided moral support (and beer) as I attempted to spell my way to glory.

I choked early on "propagate," believe it or not -- I blame stage fright. By the next round I had a beer in me and was much happier to get up and spell "knickknack" (I asked if there was a punctuation mark in there, because my instinct is to hyphenate that, but they said no), and then "chirr." Easy!

Round three was my undoing. First they hit me with a Gaelic word: something like "uiquiseagh" -- I remember it started with a "u" and there was a "q" in there as well. Improbably, I got the first part right, but failed to divine the magical "eagh" ending from the pronunciation. Curse you, Gaels!

Then they followed it up with "desinence," which I got wrong by one letter, thus striking out and retreating to my table in ignominious shame. (I-G-N-O-M-I-N-I-O-U-S, ignominious. Why couldn't they have given me that one??)

Some of the words in the later tie-breaking round were crazy-hard. As I looked around the room at lots and lots of people with glasses, wearing sensible plaid shirts and polar fleeces, or even a suit in one case, many sporting graying hair, I realized that what I like to do for fun may be a bit... outré. (O-U-T-R-E, outré.)

Still, I enjoyed trying to spell my way out of a wet paper bag. :-)