I didn’t become a regular coffee drinker until I met my wife and settled into a lazy AM routine of sunshine, catching up on news, and plenty of cream and sugar in my cup.
Add kids to the brew, and stir in a unhealthy shot of constant, crazy world events, and I like to temper my morning transition from sweet, sweet sleep into the madcap world of the ambulant with a few rounds of mental calisthenics.
For the last couple years or so that’s meant starting the day with a quadruple play of games from the New York Times.
I always take on Wordle, first. It’s the one that got me into the ritual of a morning puzzle in the first place, and pulled me over to the Times once they bought the game.
I can be a tad obsessive about my streak. It’s not so much how few guesses I can get it in — my self-analysis says there’s got to be writerly geeks like me out there used more to witting and rewriting and flashes of inspiration than calculatedly running through the permutations of vowels and consonants that we end up guessing more words that could fit than shoehorning the only options. So I’ve scored a few wins in one or two words, but most often I enjoy the play of getting to four or five or even that last entry before ultimately nailing it.
One of my earliest streaks probably should’ve stretched to 250 days, even 300 if not for a trip to South Korea and fumbling the time change. Since then I’m right on it each morning, and have suffered a few bouts of the morning blues if I snap a good streak. I am chasing morning after morning to get back above 98%!
After dispatching with Wordle, it’s on to Spelling Bee, which can keep me content to chip away throughout the day, or lately, now that Past Puzzles keeps the game alive for two weeks, for days on end until I hit Genius.
Spelling Bee, of course, isn’t anything like the community contest from our grade school days. It most resembles games like Scattergories or Scrabble where you have a set of letters and need to assemble them into winning options. For me, though, it’s most like the idle scribbling I did through musicology lectures in college, starting each class with a letter and listing all the words I could think of that began with it.
When each game expired after 24 hours, I fed my completionist tendencies by checking the hints once I got stuck — comparing each of my words of varying lengths to each letter in the puzzle to methodically knock off any remaining options. But it’s more satisfying to switch out after the well’s run dry, only to come back, later, and get the rush from seeing the letters in a new light and having new answers materialize. Again, I think my writerly and musical brain works most like that: not forcing it and elating the sudden, natural inspiration.
Game three on my morning wake up list, lately, is Connections, which shows you a grid of 16 words that are related in four specific ways. The fun of this one is the that my brain will make those instant connections, but often they’ll be false ones — no doubt planned that way by the designers. I’ve learned to lay off the initial guesses and think through multiple combinations, testing different word tenses and parts of speech until I’ve linked up each set of four. There’s a lot more satisfaction getting a perfect score here, though taking a wild stab when you’ve know you’ve got three and try to shoehorn that last one in can be its own sort of dopamine hit.
Before Connections came along I played a math game in this slot. But the answers there all seemed obvious, in that immutable way of mathematics. And I never failed to get the highest rating. Maybe if the Times had added, well, a timed element to it they wouldn’t have scrapped it.
Once I’m suitably warmed up, I hit the mini Crossword last. Here I’m all about that cross-eyed, nimble-minded, free-associating zen I’d like to cultivate the rest of the day, and I’m after solving the puzzle of 10-15 words in as little time as possible.
When we’d first moved to Sioux Falls, we got the local Argus-Leader delivered, and I paired my morning coffee with the local, big crossword puzzle. But the Times it was not.
And though the Mini is not the renowned “big” version of increasing difficulty from Monday through Sunday, it offers enough of an ask-and-answer rhythm that I don’t make myself late for work or curse my education. Average time is 40 seconds or so, and I move from there into the snapping maw of the day.
The family that Worldes together….
Adding a fun dimension to my morning wake-up, my mom and next-youngest brother both regularly begin their day with the same puzzles.
If you hadn’t guessed it by now, my keeping track of scores in different ways in different puzzles may reveal a slight competitive tendency in me, and that’s most likely hereditary. Around about 6:30, 7 am, weekday or holiday or Christmas morning my phone starts buzzing with notifications as Mom and bro weigh in with their results.
Surely, there are more meaningful, and wordy, ways we could check on each other, especially in these fraught times. But with Sun barely up, and the coffee still hot, counting how many seconds I’m ahead of my mom, or keeping myself ahead in my Wordle streak seems about the right, light touch.
We’ll save the heavy, emotional and philosophical gymnastics for after lunch.
Dadsense 
Leave a comment