Puzzled

I swore I was never going to get sucked into the whole Wordle thing. 

Attribution below. Don't attempt unless you know Frisian.

Day after day, I'd see others posting their Wordle score on Facebook, and for years I resisted, certain it was a time-killer and I didn't have any of that to waste.

But, as usual, I was the latecomer to the feast, and here I am, digging hungrily into this new pastime. 

If it stopped there, it wouldn't be a big deal. But now I have the New York Times' puzzle app on my phone, and I'm a goner.

"How in the world did I get here?" you may wonder. 

I blame my subscription to the NYT newsletter. One day, at the bottom, it talked about a new game called "Strands." It's a word search but the words go every which way. Maybe I was bored that fateful day or whatever, but I decided to try it.

That was my undoing. I quickly got hooked, and decided to download the NYT puzzle app so I could do it every day.

Alas, the new word game isn't part of the app, as I discovered after downloading it to my phone. However, there are several other games, including Wordle, Connections, Letter Boxed, Tiles, Sudoko and a mini and maxi crosswords. To top it all off, there's the diabolical Spelling Bee, in which you try to make as many words as you can from a set of letters. 

While most of the games take only two or three minutes to do, the Spelling Bee is a real time suck. Mr. Ginley has growled at me over this repeatedly. 

"Are you playing that damn game again?" has become a refrain. Well, and sure, isn't he doing the crossword, Sudoko and anagram puzzles in the newspaper every day? (Okay, I do the Jumble and ScrabbleGram every day, too, but that's beside the point.)

I suppose all this puzzling is due to my being a word nerd, which can't be helped. We'll call it an occupational hazard.

And when I retire? 

I'll tell you it's keeping my brain going. As hobbies go, it's dirt cheap.

Just don't ask me to share my scores on Facebook!

Photo attribution: Kees Swart, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Fun fact: the name of this puzzle is Slangesiker puzel Wâldsang, or "Snaking Puzzle," as translated from Frisian, a nearly-defunct West Germanic language that's spoken spoken primarily in the northern Netherlands in the province of Friesland (Fryslân). Now, you know the rest of the story!