Puzzles

We used to do the crossword puzzle, 7 Little Words and the Jumble out of the semi-daily local paper. We would do the crossword together and Donna would do the 7 Little Words & Jumble. If she got stumped, I would help out.

Then back in December last year we made a seemingly innocent purchase of a jigsaw puzzle. But we got addicted to doing jigsaws and the word pencil games no longer got done. Our noses have been stuck inside square cardboard boxes filled with cut pieces of cardboard with brightly colored images glued to one side of them since then. But Donna has still faithfully cut out the newspaper puzzles and we have amassed quite a pile of them. Every once and a while she’ll grab a month’s worth 7 Little Words and hand me the same sized pile of Jumbles so we can try and keep the backlog around six months worth. This morning I got a stack of Jumbles from March.

I get the Jumbles because they, for whatever reason, are in my wheelhouse. I also have a better grasp of the pun like answers involved in the cartoon. Most of the time I can get the top two 5-letter words without having to use paper to unscramble them. More often than not I do have to use some paper to figure out what the bottom two 6-letter words are. Sometimes just writing those six letters down in a different order will let me see the word and others I have to shuffle them around a dozen times before I get it. Every once and a while I’ll get totally stuck on a word and I will cheat by checking for the scrambled word answers at jumbleanswer.com. Also, every once in a while, I’ll get three of the four words and the cartoon answer, which allows me to solve that word.

The Sunday puzzle is more difficult than the other six days because instead of 4 jumbled words, it has 6 and all of them are 6-letters long. Plus the cartoon answer usually has well over a dozen letters in it. Today, I almost hung up my Jumble pencil for good because I did something that was pretty improbable. I got to the first Sunday Jumble of March and I aced it. I could figure out all six of the six letter words and filled in the cartoon answer without having to write anything down on paper to solve. I’m not ready to start doing them in pen just yet, but boy did that feel good.