Stefan

It's funny how a wrong answer with a right letter can accidentally unlock things for you. Facing a three letter "project" (for I could only conceive of it as a noun) I thought of Job (not the character—that's intended to be in "capital correct/lowercase incorrect" format); checking whether and how the J would work in the across clue with the few other letters I'd put in there, I came up with THATSMYJAM and was excited enough about this that I forgot about finishing the Job until it was obvious that it was JUT and "project" was a verb.

I realized circa 2014 that when you number its letters 1-7 from left to right, GOOF OFF's odd letters spell GOOF and its even letters spelled OFF. Glad to see this knowledge getting around.

I was thinking the "netminder" could be a fisherman (or -woman), which biased how I dealt with the top left corner: when I saw the third word was A, the biting comment became a DIs, and the Spanish "that" became ESe (one of the other two Spanish endings for said demonstrative pronoun), ultimately leaving me with seALIE and making me believe "sealie" might be a slang term for someone who works on a boat. Luckily it was the only questionable word I had when the site told me I wasn't done yet, and once I thoroughly considered my other options on the Spanish word, DIG and GOALIE fell into place.

Trying to join in on the game of making our own themed clues/answers, the best I can do is a bilingual one: Bred -> BRAVO NETWORK ("red" is the Spanish word for "network")

I didn't have a problem with it, but the McDonald's name for the breakfast sandwich is McGriddles, always with an S, for reasons I couldn't tell you. Nothing official (menu, packaging, advertising) ever has it singularized.

After filling in the bottom four crosses, I had smuCKER for a second for the grocery store surname, but gave up on that because I doubted the pool wear would end with U. I was stuck on the top left for a good little bit, until I considered the possibility that EEP could fill in that B___S space, which got me to SPEEDO, then to TVSET and CROCKER, to VENEER, to TREETOADS and SEEDMONEY, which took care of TENREC for me and got me through just under the 20-minute wire.

I filled in the last square but got the message that there was still room for improvement. I think on my second time through the acrosses and downs I realized that bootleggers aren't so concerned about the RAIn and that NADIYA sounds more like a name I'm familiar with than NAnIYA (not that there aren't plenty of names that sound like nothing I'm familiar with). Alas, I still wasn't done. Three more trips through and I finally reassessed my assumptions that the jackets for Masters champions at Augusta National are PgA green and that Kevin Costner played gARP (or indeed, that that's a 1994 title character).