Saturday, March 18, 2006

sudoku is taking over my life

I resisted the Sudoku craze for a long time. Something so trendy couldn't possibly be fun. I had an image in my mind of something like the "Jumble" that used to be in newspapers, and thousands of tragically hip city dwellers feverishly hunched over it.

Then, during In-Laws' visit a couple of weeks ago, I picked up the Bangkok Post. I wanted to read about the political situation in Thailand (which I'm emphatically NOT going to write about--I don't know enough about it to write intelligently), but after reading the front page articles I was irresistably drawn to the comics page, which contains mostly American comic strips like FoxTrot.

There it was at the bottom of the page.

Daily Sudoku.

Mother-In-Law and I were waiting for Husband and Father-In-Law to return from their technology frenzy (from which we were happily excluded), and I thought that the Sudoku might be a good way to waste some time.

It was all over.

It didn't take me long at all to go from "I guess I'll give it a shot" to "Hey, this is kind of fun" and finally, inexorably, to "Where can I find some more of these?"

I found myself typing "sudoku" into Google. I bookmarked this website. I started printing out puzzles. Soon I'd progressed from "easy" to "medium," and you wouldn't believe my excitement when I figured out how to solve them without making lots of little notes in the margins. Our coffee table was recently piled with finished Sudoku (I cleared them off in shame when we were about to have company). I've even got Husband doing it.

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