sarahgrin

For months I’ve been playing the Friday “easy mode” puzzle first to build my crossword vocabulary and solving skills… and today I solved the regular puzzle without it! (I can see from the comments that several folks think today’s was too easy for a Friday, but I’m gonna take the W. Sometimes I get stuck on a Tuesday and fly through a Thursday — and I don’t think I’ve ever finished a Friday completely unaided before. Here’s to learning! 🥂 Happy solving to all!)

(You’ve got a couple extra letters in your 17A answer here! Should just be MUSICNOTES, although fwiw I agree, the term flows off the tongue more easily with that extra syllable.) Really enjoyed this puzzle! Not too easy, but also not too hard. Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually the trickiest for me, something about the more obscure clues and often being themeless. Thanks so much Joseph!

For years, puzzles after Wednesdays were frequently beyond me, but I’ve been getting better! For several weeks now, I’ve been doing Friday on “easy mode” first, to try and build my crossword vocabulary. Today I noticed a discrepancy—the first letter of 56A is different in the two versions of the puzzle! Has this ever happened before?? Was it an error, or just another way to make “easy mode” more accessible?

I thought this was so fun! Doubt it would have felt so accomplishable without the shaded squares. I originally filled with the across clues correctly spelled (“oh the shaded boxes are birds spelled backwards!”). This made all the crossing downs look like gibberish, but it made sense to me. I was solving on my phone, and when the puzzle told me I had at least one square out of place, I went back and reread slowly, looking for typos and mentally flipflopping answers to justify that NHAH was actually THAW (or whatever, you get it, etc etc). I looked up a couple spellings (HIE and ENOKI), and then opened this column for clues. Only then did I realize I had flipped the wrong answers! After spelling the birds right way forward, the puzzle congratulated me and said I was a little slower than usual. 😹 That’s ok, it wasn’t very long ago that I could only sometimes finish a Wednesday puzzle. Here’s to growing and improving, to this kind community of solvers, and to the archive of puzzles! 🥂🥂🥂 see you in the next one!

As a professional musician, it was a delight to fill in MELISMA! (At the risk of sounding stereotypical, I admit I almost never know the sports references, haha!)