Climmming

Today I spent an hour dragging my tubby frame up a climbing wall repeatedly — something I haven't done in literally years. I had forgotten several things about climbing:

1. It bloody hurts
2. It's bloody terrifying
3. Fit, talented people are annoying
4. The routes marked "easy" aren't
5. You always end up pulling muscles that you previously had not even suspected the existence of
6. "Climbing wall vs. skin" is a rather one-sided match
7. Your fingers don't work for the rest of the evening
8. In general, "ow"

Can't wait to go again next week!

Silly word games

I've been trying to make the longest words possible with the shortest number of different letters. Without looking anything up on the internet (Edit: or writing perl scripts, clever though that may be), I've managed to think of:

N	Length	Letters	Word
2	5	e, s	esses
3	8	e, f, r	referrer
4	10	a, e, r, s	reassesses
5	13	e, g, i, n, r	reengineering

Can anybody think of any advances on those?

(Any reply involving the word 'smiles' will result in a swift, yet painful, death.)