Hey, you have to start somewhere. I've been ruminating an elaborate analogy between doing Sudoku puzzles and puzzling over religion, but I have a few more "pencils to sharpen" and walks around the block to take before I'll be ready to essay it.
Suffice it for now that I had a Sudoku breakthrough on the flight over to Honolulu on July 18. You know, the typical flight magazine has a puzzles page....Anyway, I solved the two Sudokus I found there, then later found a fresh copy of the magazine and solved them again. I even took a third fresh copy off the plane at HNL and solved them again sometime during the week. (And I think I may have solved them yet again at the beginning of the late July 25 flight home— before I fell asleep for a six-hour nap before arriving in Atlanta the next day.)
I know, they were becoming easier and easier—but not only because I had become familiar with these particular puzzles, but also because I was practicing my technique. Somehow, I was acquiring the power to take in more combinations than just the horizontal and vertical sweeps across or down each set of three nine-square cells to pick off the gimmes. I found myself working combinations of the nine numbers in a cell with the nine numbers in selected rows or columns running through the cell. Oh, glory, how heady was the feeling! My wife was no longer the only proficient Sudoku solver in the house.
And addictive. Not unlike my continuing to rake the dead coals of the fire to which I consigned religion.
Let that be my preamble. [I wrote up the analogy on August 11.]
Smile, frog! Open that musing mouth. Sing!
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