My husband and I both slept miserably on Saturday night, finding ourselves wide awake in the middle of the night asking each other why we couldn't sleep. But even though Sunday morning was rough, we continued our Sunday routine by being downstairs in time to listen to the Sunday Puzzle by Will Shortz on NPR (which airs at exactly 10:40am. If you tune in at 10:45am, you will miss it. And yes, I know this from experience).
We turned on the radio a tad early and were greeted by a weather forecast with not-so-delightful content delivered in quite a delightful way. Apparently, a Nor'easter is approaching (not delightful) and meteorologist Dave Epstein (delightful) was explaining how if the storm shifts ever so slightly, it would be possible for the line between snow and rain to be so specific as to see rain east of the rotary in Gloucester (aka "on the island"), and snow west of the rotary (aka in "West Gloucester"). It was delightful to hear him actually using places and landmarks familiar and applicable to me. Usually during weather forecasts, I have to guess about the weather that we will actually experience because of the peculiarity of where we are located. Here in West Gloucester, we are definitely not on the coast, but sometimes we are close enough to the coast to get coastal weather. Most of the time, we are too far inland from the coast and we get drastically different weather than our island neighbors. Also during weather forecasts, the focus is usually on Boston, and areas west of I-95 or I-495, totally not applicable to us. So it was delightful to hear Dave talk about our neighborhood, but it was not delightful to hear that while the island might get a dusting of snow, we might get 6 inches of snow, if the storm shifts even just a tad. Being greeted by this bad news, the first news we heard since waking up, exasperated my husband and I. And we both expressed our sentiments by yelling, "Hate you Dave Epstein!" which made us laugh hysterically in that sleep deprived way one does, which was also quite delightful.
Then finally The Puzzle began. Each Sunday Will Shortz gives a puzzle that you have until Wednesday to solve (and to submit your answer). If your answer is correct and chosen amongst the other correct answers, you could be on the radio with Will Shortz to do some puzzling with him.
Last week's puzzle was challenging, and I did not submit an answer, even though I sort of came up with one. The question: "Think of a hyphenated word you might use to describe a young child that sounds like three letters spoken one after the other."
The only answer I could come up with was "pee-pee-er" (the letters P, P, and R), but I neglected to submit it because I was not confident in it (and TBH, I forgot).
Will Shortz announced that the answer was: "cutie-pie" (the letters Q, T, ....and PI?). He used a Greek letter of the alphabet?? Totally not fair! Pi is not a letter! My husband and I felt tricked and betrayed. And we both expressed our sentiments by yelling, "Hate you Will Shortz!" which made us laugh even more hysterically in that sleep deprived way one does, which was most delightful. That's when my husband mentioned that we might actually be sleep deprived, and I agreed. And laughed some more. Hahaha.
Then Will Shortz gave the puzzler for this week. "Start in a certain state, drive to another, then another and then another. Take the postal abbreviations of the four states you visit, mix the letters up and use them to spell a common eight-letter word."
Immediately my husband and I were intrigued. This sounded totally solvable. My husband announced that he was gonna write a computer program with an algorithm "to solve this by Wednesday" which made me laugh so hard that I started coughing. My husband then demanded "Don't die on me yet! I haven't solved it yet!" which of course made me laugh and cough even harder. Such delight!
By 1:30pm, I solved the puzzle using a pen and piece of paper and submitted my answer: the word is ornament, the states are Nebraska (NE), Missouri (MO), Arkansas (AR), and Tennessee (TN). My husband was still writing the program (he used an undirected graph of the states to determine and to input all possible state connections, and told the program to rearrange the letters of sets of four state connections and then search for words in a dictionary.) By 2pm, the program was running, but it was gonna take awhile. Fast forward to the end of the evening, and my husband has discovered a bug in his program. He fixes it, and promptly solves the puzzle. The program found a TON of words (some of which are not "common" so we are not counting as the answers), but below are the common words the program found that we submitted for the answer:
flagrant (FL, GA, TN, AR)
moleskin (NE, KS, MO, IL)
diamonds (ND, SD, IA, MO)
ornament (NE, MO, AR, TN) [also, the program found ornamental if you add a fifth state, AL]
nonmetal (AL, TN, MO, NE)
ransomed (AR, MO, NE, SD)
nominate (NE, IA, MO, TN)
eskimoan (KS, MO, IA, NE)
animator (IA, MO, AR, TN)
saintdom (SD, IA, MO, TN)
condemns (CO, NE, SD, MN)
takingly (IL, KY, TN, GA)
moralism (IA, MO, AR, MS)
Leave it to my husband to break the puzzle and find ALL the answers. He is such a delight. 💕
He also had the program run for words consisting of more than 4 states, and the most fascinating lists were those consisting of 7 states (14-letter words) and 8 states (16-letter words). These might have to be featured in an upcoming round of jeo-party.
Let's hope Will Shortz picks our answer and we get to be on the radio!
With delight,
♥Jamie
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