This blog's title is the actual number of clues! This is a crosswords puzzle for the ages, the newspaper puzzle on Christmas Day!! Four or five family members worked on it on Christmas Day while they were here. I worked on it last night at midnight while Gerry was asleep, and this morning while he is skiing. He worked on it last night when I was doing other things. It may well be a week-long puzzle!
The puzzle clues themselves are not very difficult. There are other challenges. The first is the size of the clue numbers. Even my bifocals have a hard time deciphering a 833 from a 883 down. The next big challenge is keeping your place. When your eye leaves the puzzle to go in search of the clue, by the time you have found the clue, you have completely forgotten exactly where the place is on the puzzle you were working. You could hold you place with your finger, but when working on puzzles, one is typically looking up nearby clues as well, to confirm what you think the answer is. This becomes impossible, as there is no sequence of fingers and eye movement that can hold all that together. And the move from the across section to the down section is a many numbered nightmare.
We keep the puzzle out laying on the counter for whoever wants to undertake solving it. The page is much bigger than the counter, so that complicates things further. Since we eat at the table, that would not be a good place to store the evolving crossroad torturer.
One could simply toss it into the recycle bin, I suppose. It's a temptation. But no one has. It seems the temptation to solve it is stronger. I do hope this Christmas Day puzzle is a once in a lifetime newspaper inclusion and not an annual event!
That would be too much to bear! Sigh.
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