7 months to go

It is a little under 7 months until the Labor Day weekend, 2012, in which I intend to enter a Scrabble tournament in Irving, Texas. I do not expect to win this tournament, but my goal is to place in the top 50% of all participants. So if 100 people are there, my record will be in the top 50 of all players. If a thousand people are there, I'll settle for being in 500th place. But I know I have my work cut out for me. I'm well read and have a large vocabulary - of normal English words. But probably more than half the words in the Scrabble dictionary are foreign words that not even the most intellectual intellectual would know, unless he or she studied the dictionary - which is of course what I've got to do. I intend to memorize at least 2,000 new words by September 1. I have the 2- and 3-letter words down pat now (thanks to me taking advantage of my own books, Eve Le QiNu's Unofficial Scrabble Study Guides to 2 and 3 letter words) but there are still a helluva lot more words to go. Dallas Fort Worth actually has quite a few Scrabble tournaments a year, so my Scrabble future depends on this tournament. I live a minimum of a 12 hour drive away. With the cost of gas and hotels, it wouldn't be worth it for me to attend any more tournaments (after this one in September) unless I knew I would do well enough in the tournaments to make it worth my while. Of course I have other reasons for going into Texas. The WASP Musuem in Sweetwater, Texas for a start. Other aviation museums. Some dinosaur tracks, etc. But Scrabble would be the main impetus for going. So these next 7 months are very important.