Diet Coke & Puzzles

I'm completely addicted to Diet Coke. If you are reading this, you most likely already knew that.

I'm also addicted to puzzles. Crossword, Sudoku, Jumble*, Word Search, Up & Down Words etc. You name it, I love the challenge. In fact, my normal weekday routine at work is to sit down at my laptop and complete the following puzzles respectively: Yahoo! Daily Crossword, USA Today Crossword, Word Round-Up, Up & Down Words, Quick Cross and Sudoku. At home, there are usually numerous Life Beat sections from the Projo floating around for me to work on at my leisure. I do these puzzles on commercial breaks during Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and between rounds of a few of my favorite online games, notably, Out of Order and Text Twist. I recently tweeted (@StrategicSalad) about Text Twist and its glory, comparing its addictive nature to that of the game Snood.

Ever wonder what good spending so much time on puzzles could do? I have. Besides committing to memory random seaports from around the globe, countless Latin phrases, the greek alphabet, synonyms for words that don't need them and Edna Ferber's name, puzzles help strengthen your brain. The rate of said strengthening appears to be fairly slow because I still cannot complete the Friday Crossword from a NY Times. Here is a quick little article for those interested, http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20030618/alzheimers-mental-activity. For more info just google it, I don't feel like linking every fucking site that comes up. kthx.

Seeing as it is no 3:00 AM, I should probably try to fall asleep. Hopefully I will be inspired for a second entry before too long!

Thanks for reading!


*Doing the Jumble has become less of a challenge over the years, so now I usually try and solve it without unscrambling the words. Corny jokes are something I love, which makes the challenge fun. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself!