Author: plusjeremy

DNF. I did well here. Fell asleep at one point, woke up re-energized and finished all but one. Lots of clever clueing here and tasty answers. In the end, I was stumped by a clue where I knew neither the definition nor a relevant piece of wordplay.

38:00, with the last four or five clues taking 10–15 minutes! I worked on this one with my seven-year-old son, who had several good ideas, and was racing alongside me, trying to figure out how these things work.

The puzzle started easily enough with 1 Across, but I got bogged down on the right-hand side towards the end and had to grind it out a letter at a time. Still, I imagine others will find this on the easier side.

DNF. I finished more than half of this one, and then started falling asleep uncontrollably for five minutes at a time. Very very tired coming out of a bout of Covid in our family, so I’ll have to count this one as a loss!

33:24. Not bad for a barely functioning brain! First week back in the classroom, alongside my own research and my kids’ hectic schedules meant that I couldn’t really focus on this one. It seemed like a solid puzzle; nothing jumped out at me.

This was a toughie, for sure, although at the beginning I was terribly distracted by goings-on with children and bedtime, so I didn’t get any flow.  Somewhere around the 15–20 minute mark, my brain clicked on and I could pick up steam, but towards the end things ground to a halt again. By the end, I had too much head-scratching to submit, yet all was correct in a hair under 56 minutes.

I was so excited to finish this one in 18:59 that I didn’t look closely and submitted with a typo. Ah well! I kept waiting for something sneaky to crop up, but this puzzle stayed fairly gentle throughout.

I can’t quite tell the difficulty level here because I began this puzzle while waking up from a nap. Everything seemed a bit blurry at the beginning, but most of it was clear by the end.

30:32, a time which in no way reflects the difficulty of this puzzle, but rather the difficulty of trying to solve the puzzle while tending to my children who kept getting out of bed. If only I could think about these clues for more than a few seconds without being interrupted, I kept saying to myself.

To say that this wasn’t meant to be would be an understatement. This wasn’t the hardest puzzle I’ve ever (not) solved, but it was surely the most head-scratching and confusing.

After several tricky Fridays in a row, I finally got a breather. Athough there were still some unknowns here and wordplay was important to follow carefully, I imagine my time will be among the slower for the solvers here.