Another Day in the Country
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
Tooltime Tim got me hooked on Sudoku. Curious as to what he was noodling over in the newspaper, I asked, "Watcha doin'?" And the next thing I knew I was doin' — Sudoku — and I haven't stopped since. It's very addictive.
For those of you who are not Sudoku fans, it's a numbers game, like a crossword puzzle. Instead of lining up letters to form words, you are lining up numbers 1-9 in every direction of a nine-square square. Sounds more complicated than it is because if you can count to nine, you can play Sudoku.
There are levels of Sudoku from "easy" to "difficult." If you are such a whiz at it that you get bored with "difficult," you can graduate to mind-boggling horrific puzzles with 16 squares and numbers in every direction. Sometimes for these, they give you extra room in the book to practice. The more difficult the Sudoku puzzle, the better TTT likes them. I, on the other hand, love the easy ones.
"Stretch your mind," says Tooltime Tim.
""I don't need the aggravation," I retort. "Especially, early in the morning." I love doing Sudoku with breakfast. A cup of tea, an English muffin and my Sudoku book and I'm set for a relaxing start to the day.
I got my daughter started on Sudoku — it's catching, like the measles. She loves doing them on the airplane when she's traveling or in the bathroom taking a break. She called the other day and said, "You know Mom, I've decided that relationships are like playing Sudoku — you start filling in the blanks and inadvertently make a wrong move and about the time you are ready to fill in the last of the puzzle, you discover that you did something wrong and you have to unravel the whole thing and start over."
Did I tell you about "one wrong move" when I started? Ooops! That's the bugaboo in Sudoku. You can think you are right, but be dead-on wrong. Then this little game of fun becomes hard work.
"You're just too impatient," TTT says to me. "You guess at things." And if we go back to that analogy about relationships being like Sudoku, you know where impatience and guessing gets you — in trouble!
Doing Sudoku is like therapy for me — the easy puzzles, that is. I talk to my puzzle by writing in the blank space beside the square when I'm finished. "Well now!" I wrote this morning in exasperation with a sarcastic explanation point at the end. That's because every direction I went in this particular puzzle there were blanks requiring a 3-5-9 combination. Maddening.
Sometimes there are just smiley faces beside the puzzle — that means I breezed right through without any boo-boos.
"Got it!" says the notation on #23. That means it must have been a more difficult puzzle masquerading as an easy one.
"Charging ahead, blissfully ignorant and made a wrong move," says #52.
"Got this one second time around," says #54.
#59 just has an angry black mark across a half-finished puzzle with the notation, "Screwed up." #41 has a similar notation, "Screwed up last minute — no time to fix."
#15 has a notation about what to get my daughter for her birthday and across the page on #19 there's a wonderful quote which I will leave you with today — the television must have been on the educational channel while I was eating breakfast.
The quote says, "Anytime a man speaks out against injustice, he sends out a tiny ripple of hope!"
That's a good place to end/begin, on another day in the country.
