Afloat with the Spelling Bee

At the end of February, I wrote about my ongoing obsession with the New York Times Spelling Bee daily puzzle.  A month ago of course now seems like life on a different planet.  So what was a dubious but mostly harmless recreation has now, in the midst of stay-at-home edicts, empty streets and external horrors, a different kind of lifeline.

It's become a thing for many people, I read: a hobby or hobby-like activity to anchor the day and the pulsing in and out of sanity.  So I am called to do a brief update on mine.  (For those who don't know the game, check my first post on the subject.)

Although I previously expressed a desire to resist the need to meet my twin goals of reaching Genius level and getting the 7-letter Pangram every time,  I have in fact added more than another 30 days to my previously unbroken record of doing so (excuse me if this is becoming a broken record) though I'm not sure how long it actually is.  Over 130 straight days (or, in my case, nights) anyway.

By this time, new puzzles are giving me deja vu--I feel I've done them before.  But if so, this prior experience hasn't resulted in faster results, or at least not much faster, particularly when the puzzle is troublesome.

Some of my blind spots remain remarkably consistent.  The worst case was a Pangram I worked hours on, including reverting to pen and paper to jot down words that don't include the center letter but might be used in compound words, but also because I've found that if I just string out the seven letters in a line I can see patterns I missed when the letters are arrayed in a circle.  Except this time it didn't work.  I was back working with the wheel when I got the word ("typhoid.")  Then, when I glanced back at the letters I'd written in a line, I saw that they pretty much spelled out that very word, with just one transposition. It took me hours to find what was staring me in the face.  Very humbling.

Though I've become a bit faster in finding the words that these puzzles often repeat, at other times I manage to find new words while not finding words I had found in earlier puzzles.  And I remain puzzled by some of the words the puzzle-makers accept and especially the ones they reject.  I really don't understand why they accept "Panhellenic" and not "Hellenic."

I notice that in my previous post I failed to mention the most alarming byproduct of doing these puzzles, which was that my brain continued to shuffle through a random series of words and spellings even when I wasn't doing the puzzle, even to the point where I caught myself doing so in my sleep.  That has fortunately lessened.

I do find myself tiring earlier.  After 25 words in the longer puzzles I'm usually losing concentration.  But all in all, it doesn't seem like a time to look a gift life preserver in the mouth.