Days 3425 – 3431

 Aka Monday 8th April to Sunday 14th April 2024

…a(nother) very chilled week this week. Still resting up my gouty foot, so no going out partying or for exercise, so mostly the week was spent working, watching Youtube/Netflix/old DVDs, listening to music and reading. It also gave me the chance to catch up with my Lego building, firstly the Lambo a got for my birthday:

…and the classic Bond Aston Martin:

…the post man also delivered ‘Torpedo 1972’ #2:

…which is tad…rapey…and I think I will drop it…and I did this week’s G2 Crosswords, kicking off with Monday’s crossword:

…which get’s the crossword week off to a grand start, as we were able to solve 95.24% of the 21 clues, only missing one clue. We got stumped by ‘kind of research’ and didn’t get ‘postdoctoral’, we were thinking along the lines of the actually type of research, e.g. practical or theoretical, and not what level of research. But all in all, a grand start to the week…

…Tuesday’s crossword goes equally as well, we solved 95.83% of the 24 clues, missing just one. The clue proving troublesome today was’2023 Wimbledon champion’, mostly because we don’t follow much sport, and defo don’t follow tennis, so we didn’t know that ‘Alcaraz’ won Wimbledon in 2023…

…Wednesday’s crossword takes a massive tumble down, as we only solved 83.33% of the 18 clues! On the bad side, we missed three clues, but on the good side, we didn’t know the answer for two of them, and the third one, ‘Morocco’ from ‘kind of leather’, we have a vague memory of having been a previous clue. So, we relearnt that ‘Morocco’ is a ‘kind of leather’ and learnt that ‘Oleander’ is an ‘ornamental shrub’ and that ‘ab initio’ means ‘from the start’. Hopefully, this is just a mid-week slump and we’ll be back to normal crossword solving tomorrow…

…and Thursday’s crossword finds us still in slump town, only solving 89.47% of the 19 clues ☹ yeah, am improvement compared to yesterday, but not by much. A chewy grid and we missed two clues, one we should have gotten, ‘Q in the Nato alphabet’, for ‘Quebec’, and one that taught us that ‘pulchritudinous’ means ‘beautiful’. Roll on some less chewy grids please…

…Friday’s crossword finds us back on track, solving 95.65% of the 23 clues. A nice straight forward grid today, a few chewy ones, but not unsolvable. And we learnt that ‘fallacious’ means ‘unsound’, which is nice to know…

…and Saturday’s crossword brings this crossword week to a grand finish as the little grey cells aced all 24 clues!!! Woot, woot! Nice to get a clean sweep under the belt and to end the week on…and I did the second of Guardian’s Quick Cryptic:

…which, along with the Metro Cryptic’s is defo upping my cryptic solving game and in a few months/years I might be able to do the full fat Guardian cryptic and then The Times cryptic!!!