Author: plusjeremy

52:13. I’m writing from the beaches of Southern California. Perhaps the distance from the motherland has dulled my solving abilities, but I think this was actually a tough one.

DNF. I was so absurdly off the wavelength here, there’s very little I can say. I labored to fill in as many squares as I could, but in the end, there were three clues I couldn’t get.

43:39. Well, that’s how I felt solving this puzzle anyway. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of absolutely delightful clues here (meaning surface reading, wordplay, word choice, etc), but I felt that a fair amount of the difficulty for me stemmed from using very uncommon synonyms or abbreviations. But let me parse the clues and I’ll get back to you.

20:02. It was that sort of puzzle, where clue after clue I would ask myself, “Is that a thing?”, and eventually answer, “I guess that’s a thing.”.

This one hurt.

This was an excellent puzzle, which I enjoyed bashing my head against at the time, and enjoyed even moreso while writing the blog.

24:30 for a puzzle which I found quite enjoyable, and neither too easy nor too hard. I imagine I’m on the slower side today, because I seemingly cannot finish a puzzle in under 20 minutes anymore, but nevertheless I felt at home with the clues, which is a welcome change for me.

40:52 for a challenging and very enjoyable puzzle. I worked hard, and in the end, everything was gettable.

DNF. I think a lot of the wordplay here was quite tricky (more lifting and separating than you might find in a pilates class), but I fairly raced through this one until I got to the upper-left corner. After 15 minutes of beard-scratching, I still wasn’t able to get 1 Across or Down, so I threw in the towel.

24:35, a time which reflects more confusion rather than any real difficulty. Several answers I just shrugged and went with, after a minute or two of not being able to figure the clue out.