Janet

@Andrzej Totally agree with you on ECRU. That brings to mind linen, non silk, but I didn't struggle with getting it. I remember an old children's book I read where a girl wears her sister's white dress to a party and gets a big stain on it. The mother helps her out of the situation by dying it with tea and making it all ecru and putting it back in the closet. I'm sure that's where I learned the word, and it stuck with me for 50 years. Reading as a child is EVERYTHING!

@Neal S.Boyfriend and I were SOOOOO looking forward to some animation! C'mon NYTimes -- do better! This was so fun, though, and a great puzzle!

@Darcy V Exactly! I LOVED those books, and they even made me want to become Jewish for a while. My dad went out and found a selection of dreidels for me and we played a lot that Christmas. Anyway, that was Henny who had the dress mishap, and she was my favorite!

@Nick I totally agree. Should have been easy to include and we solvers like accuracy :-).

@Sara I've been doing these for 40+ years, and I still sometimes just go to Wordplay to get some hints to get started. Depends on my mood and if I'm willing to put in the time. It is very comforting when there's a real stinker of a puzzle to come to comments and see that others hated it, too. Anyway, NYT has a great guide to doing the puzzle, and it points out that learning is the important thing, and so by all means we should Google info to help us and use Wordplay, so I gave up being a purist long ago. This puzzle was a great one for me, and CLOSED SET was the one that made me figure it out, but I left a lot of those top ones blank until then.

@Anita Totally agree! What a pleasure! I'm thinking most people had this experience? Total joy :-)

@Barry Ancona Done.

@Barry Ancona. Good eye. Well, at least the two of them have company. Just a miserable puzzle, though, IMO. At least it added to my streak -- 2,726.