Pity me, poor readers! I'm under the gun to get the Saturday crossword - the toughest of them all - done and reviewed the night before - as 12 hours from now I'll be in the air, halfway to our Caribbean vacation spot. What, you say? Not a "pity" situation? Yes, I admit, you're right about that. But oh - the pressure! And I found this a tough go after a quick start in the NW corner - I was stymied in the NE and SE quadrant for quite a while.
I have a photographer in the family, whose name appeared in my Wednesday blog and also in this grid (SIMON is "who says"), and so I am familiar with the GOLDENHOUR, the best time for photo taking right before sunset. That helped me swoop through the start of the puzzle, I entered LIGERS for "Feline hybrids" but quickly realized that its counterpart TIGONS was called for. No harm done. Just below that, "Love scene" was a cute clue for TENNIS. Got bogged down after that. A lot of white space at the bottom right took a while to resolve, with three or four false starts before it all came into focus, including the superlative CLINKED ("Made a sound with a flute").
Looking at the filled-in upper right section, it's hard to put my finger on why I had such trouble, as everything's fair and not too abstruse, other than TOADETTE, apparently a pink-headed mushroom in Mario Land. Really? COMENOW. IHATETOASK, as a "disclaimer before an uncomfortable situation", finally sprang to mind and unlocked the whole area.
Elsewhere in the grid...Nice to see ANAIS clued as something other than "Nin"! "Cook for Easter, maybe" was nice and misleading. I thought it was going to have something to do with ham, so HARDBOIL was a nice surprise.
Did I enjoy this puzzle? OHGODYES. For personal reasons, though (see above), I'm not doing it proper justice in this blog.
Thanks for "listening" all week, folks! See you on the flip side.
-philbo
"Made a sound with a flute." CLINKED. Hell, yes.
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