We'll Always Have Parrots

It's been a while, but I finally notched another bird on my ISC Bird Watching Life List.

After playing the lovely AUREOLA (thanks to my favorite word list), I got a lucky break and pulled the blank with ARS, which always sets off my bingo alert. With APRRST?, my first instinct was to play PARTERS*, which luckily was no good (With the challenge mode on VOID, the computer bounced it back). After a moment, the obvious PARROTS came to mind. I played it at 13H, but J3 would have been just as many points.

My opponent didn't have many good racks. But here he traded tiles instead of playing JIAO at 12L for 44 points. Sometimes you get a lot of vowels and you just want to run away. But you always should take a look at what you can play before you decide to trade. If I had traded when I had AAELORU, I would have missed AUREOLA and would never have been blessed with PARROTS. You gotta learn those vowel dumps. By the way, I play JIAO a lot.

The final score was 420 to 315 in my favor.