I don't get out of bed early anymore, nor do I go anywhere in the car every day. My needs are few compared to the days when our 6 children lived with us and I was busy fulfilling many of their needs before I could even begin thinking about my own. I'm 62, wondering where the years, nay, the decades, went, and, shrugging my shoulders, saying "well, at least I have the Sunday crossword to look forward to".
My Sunday NYT crossword (and the rest of the paper) doesn't arrive until Monday because it comes bundled with the Globe & Mail and the Glove doesn't publish on Sundays, so our guy doesn't deliver the Times on Sundays either. That's okay with me. I eagerly look forward to Monday mornings, and because I don't get up early, I'm usually up at 4:30 - 5 AM when the paper gets delivered, and you can find me doing the puzzle until 6 AM or so, and then I go to sleep for the day. Don't look askance at me. My sleeping and waking hours don't impact you at all.
This morning, however, I didn't go out in the freezing cold and slippery snow and the dark to retrieve our paper from the edge of the driveway, and went instead to sleep, since one of my new year's resolutions is to start getting out of bed earlier, say, at 11 AM. So when I came downstairs at 11:30 AM, I was looking forward to a bowl of cream of wheat, a cup of tea, and my puzzle. R-e-a-l-l-y looking forward to it, now that Christmas and New Year's was over and I was getting back to my quiet routine. Actually, I don't have much of a daily routine except for Mondays, when the day begins with the puzzle. Do you understand yet what a passion this puzzle is?
Okay, so I'm in the kitchen, (warning: dig at dear hubby follows) cleaning the counters after hubby's breakfast and placing his banana skin in the compost just outside the door and his recycling also just outside the door (for all his strength and all my lack of it, he seems to have trouble moving our heavy sliding door back and forth in order to deposit his detritus in the proper receptacles) and his dishes in the dishwasher. Hubby has left the day's paper on the kitchen table. It's only the Globe & Mail. No New York Times. Hubby is upstairs taking a nap, so I can't ask him about it. I run around the house looking in the usual places for the missing paper. Living room, where hub likes to read it, nada. Upstairs bedroom, zilch. Front foyer, nothing. It hits me. There is no Sunday Times today!!!
I phone my newspaper carrier. No answer, not even an answering machine or voicemail of any kind. Archaic. Old-fashioned. The phone just rings and rings. Ordinarily I would think "good on you!", but today I was miffed.
It is now an hour later, I phoned again and got my carrier's wife on the phone. After giving her my angstful story, she - bless her soul - commiserated with me and promised to contact her husband right away, which she did, as evidenced by her return call just minutes after we first talked. Turns out, he didn't receive the New York Times either, and hoped that it would arrive with his Globes tomorrow, Tuesday. He would call his manager about it, too. All I could do was heave a sigh, chat a little more with the nice lady, and resign myself to my fate. I am dead sure there will no Times tomorrow.
This happened only once before, earlier this year, and there was no Tuesday Sunday Times that week. Oh, we got a free weekday paper, but a Tuesday Times puzzle, a little thing compared to the Sunday, and not at all as enjoyable (NYT puzzles get more difficult as the week progresses, with Monday being a breeze to complete and Friday being an ornery old thing that has one scratching one's head in frustration. Saturdays are the hardest of all, with my darling Sunday puzzle falling into a Wednesday-Thursday category.)
The Sunday NYT puzzle has a scrumptiously clever theme, large grid, fantastic clues, six to 13 theme entries depending on the puzzle constructor (some, lilke Elizabeth Gorski, are brilliant), and it's pen-friendly as it appears in the magazine and not on newsprint as the weekly puzzles do.
Oh, yes, I always do the puzzle in pen. I make mistakes sometimes, which I write over. I hate a messy puzzle, so try not to make mistakes! I also love the look of a good pen's ink as it fills the little squares, and I form each letter in my best penmanship. Doing the puzzle is so much more than just coming up with the answers to the clues. I can't get into doing it online, as so many speed-solvers do because it lacks the tactile sense of pen and semi-glossy paper. I also don't aspire to do the puzzle in record time (the best do it in under 10 minutes, which I find grotesque - it takes longer than 10 minutes just to read the clues, never mind figure our which nuance the constructor has chosen to deceive you with) because I enjoy the process too much. My puzzles take about two hours to complete. If that weren't so, they wouldn't be such a start-of-the-week treat.
Over the years, I've become better at solving as I learn the ins and outs of this particulart puzzle. When Eugene Maleska was the editor, I could never finish them. They were also a little boring then with more obscure clues. Will Shortz has jazzed up the editing during his tenure so that the puzzles are an absolute joy. He is even featured in the movie "Wordplay" based on the New York Times puzzle tournaments (they're held annually!) where avid solvers and constructors assemble to take each other on and frolic in the evenings just like anyone at a convention of like minds.
I'm off to do - I'm not exactly sure. Not having the puzzle has thrown my day out of kilter. I'll let you know tomorrow if Sunday's NYT arrives with .....
! NEWSFLASH !
The phone rang and it was my newspaper carrier's manager telling me that he was crediting our account fpr the missing paper, that they have no more Times's at headquarters, that Toronto siphons them off first before we in the hinterlands get them, that our copies are printed in Buffalo and they sometimes don't send enough up, that - long story short - there is no way to get a Sunday Times to us. He was sorry, he understood, there was nothing he could do. Nice fella, and he was truly understanding, but that sill leaves me without a paper. I vented to him about there being nowhere in our area to buy the NYTimes, and Then. He. Said. The. Magic. Words: "Greenley's in Belleville carries a few copies".
Greenley's Bookstore
258 Front St. Belleville ON
P.S. I'm back home, having bought the Sunday times, the Saturday Times (last Saturday's!) and the NYT Crossword Puzzle Desk Calendar (50% off). The calendar is full of daily puzzles, which I hardly ever see, so they will all be new to me. Yippee!
I little messy, but okay. I had "adage" for "axiom" in the upper right, "out" for "cut" further down, was going for something to end in "clear" for "black and white" (lower left) but it turned out to be "squad car" (in NYC they're black and white) and, silly me, I ignored the question mark at the end of the clue "a little butter?" and put in the synonym "pat" instead of the clever "kid" for baby goat (my first knee-jerk reaction was "dab" as in a little dab'll do ya!), and for "Place where leaves are collected", I went with "navy" first before realizing it really meant tree leaves and the answer therefore was "eaves". In any case, I'm a happy camper!
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