do a crossword puzzle every day

I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this any more.

I’m not the best crossworder in the world, but that is why I want to do more of them; I want to get better at them. I’m really good at sudoku, but not word games. But I enjoy puzzles, even the ones I’m not very good at, and this goal is mostly about making time to do something I enjoy, and not study all of the time. Besides, taking time to relax will probably make me more effective when I do study. I have a book of easy crosswords, which are hard enough to challenge me, but not so hard that I get discouraged and quit.

I’m doing this on vacation, but let’s see when the vacation finish…

I used to do the newspaper crossword every day. I didn’t necessarily FINISH every day, but I did try. I would like to get into that again because I feel like my brain is fried about half the time. I used to do lots of things to keep my brain fresh – crosswords, logic problems, sudoku, etc., but I haven’t been doing them lately and I can totally tell a difference in my concentration level and just overall attitude. I think I will buy a NY Times puzzle book from Amazon and start there. Good luck, fellow crossworders!

NY Times, Of Course.

crossword puzzles are a favorite past time. People are working on them in coffee shops, sitting in the park and on the airplane traveling.

My friends in Texas do not understand the draw to solving a crossword puzzle. These are intelligent people who find them either a waste of time or confusing . . . to me it’s relaxing and fun.

I have always loved word games – like boggle and scrabble.

As a child I learned to do the crossword puzzles in our newspaper every evening with my Dad. That time became a family game to see who could guess the right word first. My brother and I carried on my Dad’s passion for crossword puzzles.

After the brain surgery my neurosurgeon insisted I read and do crossword puzzles as soon as I could as part of my recovery.

That was the easiest recovery he could have prescribed for me :)

I figure I need to do two things in order to achieve this goal:

• Find a timeslot to do a crossword every day
• Find a source for a good daily crossword

The broadsheets have good quick crosswords (cryptic, for the moment, is way past my ability) but I’m not sure I want to buy a paper every day. Most of the papers put their crosswords online, not for free, but for a subscription fee that, while much less expensive than buying papers every day, is still not cheap—that’s another option.

Of course nobody says the crosswords have to be current, I could just get a book of the things and work through that…

Finding time to do a crossword every day is the other part of the problem. It would be nice to work it into my lunch break at work but my job is very interrupt-driven and I don’t think that’ll be easy to stick to—when I try to create a routine at work I usually end up discarding all pretence of it within a couple of days.

I really need to do this… I want to get good at this sort of thing.