book and vacation poll!

[fearlesstemp]

While I was in California visiting the fantastic foxyfrau, we had many adventures, one of which ended with a group of us waiting outside for an hour and a half one night for Triple A (keys got locked in the trunk). During that wait, we found many ways to pass the time - embarrassing revelations (such as Anna's mastery of early-nineties R&B), trips down memory lane, and finally a riddle put forth by one of Anna's California friends.

California Friend said, "Marine is a six-letter word where every two letters is the abbreviation of a state - what is the seven-letter word that follows the same pattern? It also starts with M."

We stood around for a while trying to solve it out loud, and then decided we needed paper to use. One of us pulled out a book from his/her bag and said, "There's blank pages at the back we could use here! Who's got a pen?"

Now it's poll time! About this and a couple tangential issues.

[Poll #1020360]

Comments

[nydia-s.livejournal.com]

If someone wanted to write in one of *my* books it would be a different story, but I don't care what they do to their own.

*curious* I know the word I came up with works, but is it the same one you got?

[fearlesstemp.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's the same word I came up with! I'm amazed by how quickly you came up with it - there were two days in between us receiving the puzzle and solving it. We weren't working on it the whole time, of course, but there was a good chunk of time spent here and there on it. I'm so impressed!

[nydia-s.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've taken a couple of trips in the last month that have involved word puzzle books on planes and in airports, so I guess my mind was in the right gear. I had this whole methodological approach of, "Okay, it can start with MA, ME, MI, or MO, only it can't start with ME because there's no state with E...if it's MA, it can be MAL, MAR, MAZ, MAK, only it can't be MAZ, no Z..." etc. Fortunately a real word popped up fairly early in that decision tree. *g*