Veronika

Maybe not that impressive, but this is my first Friday without any lookups! And a decent time too! This will be a good day.

I love the fact that Czech seems to be an obscure language of choice for NYT crosswords - I'm guaranteed to get at least one answer right on those days! 😄

TIL that the metal ring around a pencil has a name. Adding it to the list of extremely specific words for item parts (looking at you, aglet!).

Today I learned a new word: DALLIANCE. This significantly slowed down my solve, but hey, now I know something new!

When I first saw the row of O's, I was convinced I did something wrong until I got to the W! That was fun!

Anyone else desperately wanted the answer to 27D to be ALIEN? Just me?

Even understanding the trick halfway through the puzzle didn't make it easier. Some, like the Clydesdale horse and Welch's soda, were simply unknown to me, and cluing Ashe with just "male" is extremely generic. Oh, and pOLAR has the same number of letters as PANDA. The trick in itself was neat, but either those clues or the rest of the answers should have been easier to strike a balance imo.

Oof! My US geography is severely lacking. I had to come for the revealer and feel properly humbled. However, great theme.

I caught on the theme pretty quickly, but I did not notice the ROAD in each entry until I read the column! What a brilliant top-off!

Every time I think that I am moving closer to being fully fluent in English, I am humbled by a crossword. HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE is completely new to me... which also made the solving quite a bit more complicated.

This was a fun puzzle, but I refuse to acknowledge that uie/uey are real words. I can't trust a word composed only of vowels! (Then again, we have consonant-only words in my language...)

I learned US currency nomenclature through this crossword! This must be one of the most fun rebus puzzles I've done.