Over a Decade of Mondays (and I still suck at crossword puzzles...)

Several months ago I paid about $16 for an iPhone app that gives a year of full access to The New York Times crossword puzzles. The app is pretty neat, as it allows you access to all current puzzles as soon as they are available, as well as over a decade of previous puzzles.

Since the puzzles are easiest on Mondays and they get progressively harder as the days go by, with Sunday being the hardest of all, I decided to get into crossword shape with the Mondays. I'm certainly better now than I was a few months ago. Still, in the world of crossword puzzle solvers I am still horrible at them.

I can solve Monday puzzles in about 7-8 minutes, but I usually have to submit it a couple of times before I get all of the errors weeded out. Twenty-four hours after a puzzle has been published you can unlock it and check for errors. For all of the older puzzles I did this to solve them. I think I was only able to solve two or three puzzles with absolutely no error-checking help.

I'm seriously considering buying a crossword dictionary. In the world of die hard crossword solvers I'm not sure if this is considered "cheating" or not. Still, I'm never going to be in that world, so I suppose it doesn't matter either way.

Here's a link to the app