Baker's dozen

Okay, I'm back from vacation, and the only non-book crossword I did over the long weekend was Byron Walden's Saturday NYT—on newsprint Sunday night, with my son pestering me with questions as too many minutes ticked by. Maybe I need new glasses because that little dab of ink that made the clue "Creep" look like "Greep" shouldn't have slowed me down—or maybe I need a new brain? Anyway, hard, hard, hard. I fell into a number of the traps that other people mentioned on the NYT forum, like PARTY HATS instead of PAPER HATS, and it was a tremendous relief to find out that I wasn't the only one who took a beating from Byron. (How fast was Tyler? What was the fastest applet time?)

After coming home this evening, I did the Tuesday NYT in possibly my fastest-ever Tuesday time. I credit my parents for letting me stay up late on Saturday night starting when I was nine so I could be well-acquainted with the classic SNL characters featured in Mike Torch's puzzle.

Then I caught up on a slew of other puzzles:

Sat NYT 14:45
Sun NYT 10:19
Mon NYT 2:55
Tues NYT 2:49

Sat LAT 4:17
Sun LAT 7:06
Mon LAT 2:50 (Congrats on the debut, Curtis!)

Sat CS 2:51
Sun CS 5:12
Mon CS 2:53

Sat Stumper 3:34
LA Weekly 8:24
WaPo 9:27 (Joe DiPietro can do all the Sudoku puzzles he wants so long as he'll keep constructing crosswords for us)

And tomorrow, I'll get to the Suns...