Saturday 04/02/2022
Today I had blocked out the whole morning for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I’d paid $70 a month ago, for the right to participate virtually. There was supposed to be a live stream from the real tournament site in Connecticut starting at 8am, but in fact they had some kind of technical difficulties and didn’t. The puzzles were released on schedule though, about one per hour. I was disappointed with the general amateurishness of it and decided to let the puzzles just accumulate — when I read the rules I realized there was no benefit for doing them as they were released; you basically have until Monday night to finish them.
So what to do with this block of time? I realized that this is the week before a FOPAL sale weekend. Ordinarily I would go prepare my section and take my pre-sale count on Monday, but why not today? So I did.
In the afternoon I sat down and did all six of the tournament puzzles. I ripped through five of them in good time, finished well within the allotted time and with no, or few, errors. One puzzle, #5, was an absolute demon, I couldn’t make any headway with it. I finally gave up and submitted what I had, which was pathetic. It was mostly blank squares. I got only 22 of the 100+ words in it. Anyway, sometime Monday they will post the results. Last year I was #743 of about 1200 online entrants.
Started planning a day-trip for flowers with Jean and Patty.
Codgerville 