puzzle

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When I worked at the garden center, one of my jobs was going through the Southside paper for our ads, competing ads, or any article of interest to the company. A fringe benefit was that I saved the page with the NY Times and LA Times crossword puzzles on it, and used them on long airline flights.

I need to find where I stashed the rest of those pages -- I'm running out of the ones that are currently in my backpack. As a result of this running out, I found myself working away at a puzzle from the NYT with a big torn spot in the clues. Clues 1 to 25 Across are completely missing. Clue 26 is fragmentary. A similar situation exists with the clues between 70 and 83 Across, with some portions of words visible in the first and last clues. Also the name of the puzzle was mostly gone, which makes it a little harder to determine the meta-clue to the themed phrases.

I ground away stubbornly at the thing for some time, returning again and again to the blighted areas only to see they were -- yes -- still not there. I finally put it down a while ago, and only found it again the other day. At which point, I made fairly short work of what remained. Woo! Looking at it now, I see only two words where I had to ink in corrections. The meta-theme was phrases with "EX" added somewhere to make a new phrase. The final breakthrough was coming up with "EXTRACTORTRAILERS" without a clue to go by.

So yeah, I'm feeling pride now. Just in time for summer to end, if you get my drift.
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busy busy

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Quite a week. I earned some money on Monday, worked up a letterhead, logo and invoice on Tuesday, edited a newsletter on some other days. On Wednesday, Aunt Linda called and said she and her friend John would be in the area, so over several calls, we worked out a time to get together. On Thursday, I went for a physical, as a result of which I'll have head surgery. Just trying to be like armoire_man, I guess, only in my case it's just outpatient surgery to have an irritating ingrown hair bump taken off my dome.

Friday morning, we had breakfast with Linda and John. Friday afternoon was the Wiggles concert. Friday evening I was calling the Damnable Credit Union about the ATM card they stole, and calling my bank about a replacement. Saturday morning we took Cathy's car to the shop (at which point, mine started showing the SERVICE ENGINE SOON light), and Cathy and I took Sarah out for the biscuit and I got a temporary replacement ATM card until my regular one shows up later this week.

Somewhere in there, a DVD arrived from England, with a silent Bonzo cartoon on it. Yay!

Later on Saturday, enegim appeared at our door, having mailed to let me know she would be in the area, and we had a nice visit, during which time Sarah went into hyperactive "look at me! NOW!" mode with no letup.

On Sunday, we rested somewhat. I took Sarah out for breakfast at Panera's, then we shopped a bit. Came home, had lunch, and I went upstairs and crashed for a while. After that, Sarah and I went outside with the intent of walking all the way to Mittineague Park, but got sidetracked on seeing Brett and Raisa at Danielle's house, so I more or less stood around while Sarah focused on other kids, eventually pulling out the cell phone to chat with my middle sister a while.

So. Busy, busy. Oh yeah, the engine light was only on for that one trip, but we're keeping an eye on it. I'll be driving to Springfield today to get a part for my brand-new weed whacker, which I carelessly bumped on hard surfaces instead of on grass. Now I know better.

And this morning, I sat down and tried to write a little bit of a story I plotted out years ago. The Palisades Park story.
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