Bean There, Done the Crossword

I must exercise my comedy/writing skills online more.
Firstly, I would do my small part to help people know proper spelling and usage of English words.
Secondly, some people get paid for writing.

Hubby and I visited Bean City Espresso, a very small place with seating for six people for the second consecutive day. Yesterday I started to do a puzzle in a sudoku book, waving my pen across the grid as if to conjure the answers to appear. The affable owner/barista appeared to be impressed. My eyes fell to the New York Times Thursday crossword that he had started: "well, you attempted this so you must like puzzles."

He said: "You can carry on with the crossword if you like. What I'd love to do is leave a crossword out for people to do when they come in and out, we could all solve it together." We agreed this was a good idea and started on the Thursday puzzle, with help from the husband. I can solve the Thursday puzzle with help from a smart person in about twenty minutes.

So we come in today, because he serves great Cafe Viennas, and has organic this and stevia that, and good reading/puzzling material, and he says "oh wait! I don't have the paper yet!" and he runs out of the shop to grab a local newspaper. We are left to chat with a friendly customer reading a JavaScript technical manual. I am super-impressed that he would think to buy the newspaper: I figure he does this on a daily basis, but to consider that we might want to do the crossword is excellent. Get this: there are people who like to watch people solve crosswords. I'm not very good at crosswords myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "I use the Internet to solve the TV Guide puzzles" and 10 is Tyler Hinman or Ellen Ripstein, I am a 5: the one who frequently needs help on Thursday -> Saturday puzzles. Solving a Friday or Saturday puzzle by myself is a triumph.

Friday took us an hour to do, even with some straightforward nine-letter entries: FREETIBET, AIRCANADA, THEGRUDGE, ERIECANAL. The thing with the crosswords is that my best bets are: getting a bunch of shortish pop culture clues, and scoring big with at least one nine-letter to fifteen-letter entry across the grid. I start out slowly, gulp some liquid splendour, and then the synapses fire and the letters get filled in.

We had some misdirection and wrong answers -- shame on me, for we were using a pen, but ultimately we filled in the grid with at least answers that connected and made sense to us.

Tomorrow he's going to get the Saturday puzzle. I hope he's open early enough for me or my husband.