Puzzled

Nerd Alert

I cheated.

When I played Framed this morning, I knew the movie. I recognized it on Frame 3. I knew the setting, the main actor, the director. I could not, for the life of me, pull the title from the recesses of my brain. I was pretty sure it started with “D” but that didn’t help. I went to IMDB, feeling like a loser.

I can hear you: “Pretty harsh,” you are saying. “It’s an online trivia game. What is the big deal?” Well, the big deal is that I had to confess to cheating when I sent my result to my mom and my brother on our daily group text.

It started so innocently — the three of us discovered we were all playing Wordle and enjoyed competition, but didn’t want to post our scores on social media anymore (me). We started sending our scores in a group text every morning. One day, Tim (brother) mention that he played a movie clip guessing game, so we started doing that as well — the aforementioned Framed. My mother and I are at a great disadvantage for this one, as Tim has been a film buff since childhood, and also retains pop culture information in a savant-like manner.

We found Quordle (and its companion, Quordle Sequence) soon afterwards, and added Octordle (and its Sequence and Rescue versions) because why not? We eventually rounded things out with Waffle (at which I am truly terrible) and Connections (which may well be my favorite). All told, we are playing and exchanging results for NINE games every day… plus 2 extra on Mondays when Quordle and Waffle have bonus puzzles.

All in all, we have a pretty active group text. At minimum we all send 9 texts a day, plus we react to most results from the other people (a thumbs up for a successful completion, exclamation points for a truly awesome score, sometimes a thumbs down for a struggle — but we more often just leave those blank from disdain). Of course, I have a job with regular hours, so I generally front-load — get several of them done before the other two are even awake. Tim (the musician, with the bizarre hours to prove it) often does his past midnight the night before, so he can send a text bomb to all of us when he awakens. Mom is retired, so takes her sweet-ass time — though she does prefer to get them done in the morning for the most part.

Though we are all three competitive as a rule, we are not trash-talkers. We celebrate each others’ successes and commiserate in our downfalls. Tim in particular likes to suggest we debate an answer after we are all done with a puzzle for the day, “After Mom does Connections I’ll complain.” I like to claim that some of the solutions “aren’t real words” — Tim is sympathetic to this but my mom is apt to tell me it absolutely is because she has heard of it. I refrain from telling her it is probably from “the olden days.”

Often our puzzle texts are interrupted with newsy bits:

“Your father sent his phone through the wash cycle.” — my mom, obviously.

“ETHAN HAWKE?!” — we were all watching Reservation Dogs but I was a little behind.

“Landed” — Tim, on tour, letting us know he’s safely on the ground… somewhere.

“I’m going to run Tully out for a poop.” — my mom, who cares for Tim’s beloved bulldog when Tim is on the road. This message was quickly followed by, “Sorry, Susie. You probably didn’t need to see that!”

Even though we all happen to live in the same town at the moment, the three of us rarely have the opportunity to spend actual time together. Ironically, we had more quality time when we didn’t live in the same town, and would converge on my parents’ house to stay. Dan, Dad, and the kids would go to bed, and the three of us would stay up playing board games, drinking whiskey, and laughing until we cried. Puzzling isn’t that, exactly, but it does connect us on a daily basis, and I treasure it.

Nobody uses the word, “UTILE.” I will die on this hill.

Thanks for reading.

Love, Susie