Carol

Glad it was a challenge today, because I finally hit 1000 and I feel like I earned it.

For 30 minutes all I had in the NW was A PE EAD And I thought I was stumped for the first time in a while. Somehow my brain offered up RED TAPE and it finally broke open. Wow, what a tough one.

My least favorite kind of puzzle is when I don't know if I'm getting an error because I have an answer wrong or if I'm missing some trick in how to enter the letters. I didn't know if I had to rotate the dials to get the success message, or if I had a letter wrong. Turned out the latter but I wasted a lot of time trying to move those dials before I caught it.

1000 is my goal. I cruised to 900 and thought I had it made. But these last couple of weeks have me doubting. I almost gave in today on the NW, then came up with bside, and finally got it. Whew.

Nervous starting this one today because if I complete today and tomorrow I hit 1500. Assuming Monday won't be a stumper, it was down to today. And don't you know it stumped me for a while. I had to get out a piece of paper and write out the rebus characters before I caught on that they were states. Then I wasn't sure how to enter them - I remembered that in some cases you just have to enter one letter and tried that (lazy), but that didn't work here. After double my usual time I finally got it right. Phew.

I’m one that never played Nintendo nor had it in the house, so I found this an unenjoyable slog, though I did eventually get it done through crosses. But what I realized is that if NYT hadn’t instituted the STREAK counter, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with it and I wouldn’t have cared. Now there’s this “pressure” to finish the puzzle every day whether I’m enjoying it or not. Self inflicted, I know, but kind of interesting to note.

Had some technical issues today. Finished the puzzle and got the congratulations screen with my time. Then I looked at my stats and saw that there was no credit for today. Reopened the puzzle and got the blue squares and invitation to resume, but was unable to type in the squares. Had to clear the whole puzzle and retype the same answers to finally get it show up in my stats. Kind of skewed my time.