What app is that? I do cryptic crosswords, too, but I find that I like certain constructors better than others. My favorite only does one puzzle a month. It would be nice to find another good source of puzzles.
Stamp collecting is a dying hobby. Therefore, I have been able to purchase a great number of really old, unused postage stamps, some as old as almost eighty years. Often I get them for quite a bit less than face value. I get them from various coin stores when I get a chance. I have never tried, but I bet you can get the same deals online somewhere. Sometimes I fill the entire front of the envelope with three and four cent stamps leaving only a small space for the address. If you have enough different stamps you can sometimes put together a theme that matches the contents of the envelope.
Heh, my grandmother had a baby grand, and she used to play quite well. I don’t remember that because she had a stroke when I was five, and she couldn’t play after that. She lived with her daughter (my aunt), and no one ever played it again, and my cousins never took lessons. We weren’t allowed to touch it.
I think not allowing the kids to touch the piano is a mistake; perhaps if they can play around with it, they will get interested. And some people are such musical prodigies that they can teach themselves. (Plus a piano seems a fairly durable thing and not something that a kid could break by playing it.)
I agree. I played the accordion when I was a kid, and no one wanted to fool around with that thing!
Teazel. They have a number of crossword apps. I used their cryptic crossword tutorial to learn the ropes. Now that I have a bit more experience I do find them on the easy side, but I think they have a more challenging option too.
I have paper ones I do right before bed and I love having a freshly sharpened pencil and going to town on a crossword. I appreciate the cryptic ones especially because the answer is in the clue, so once I figure out the answer, I *know" that’s the answer.
Thanks.
My favorite constructors are Cox and Rathvon. In addition to good clues, their puzzles usually have some kind of twist so that the answers may need to be altered before being entered in the grid. Sometimes they’re incredibly clever.
This page has a collection of their puzzles for the last ten years or so.
My grandfather played the accordion, my mother took lessons in her 40s to learn and gave my daughter a small one to annoy us with. Not a big fan.
Thanks for this. The last time I was in the U.S. I went into a bookstore, thinking I could buy a crossword book. Didn’t find anything I liked, and I’d like to get into the habit. My grandmother did crossword puzzles even when she was in the nursing home, and she loved talking about the interesting words she learned. And she would also gritch about the new celebrity names she didn’t know.
Junior highs and high schools typically offer chorus and band, don’t they? If you’re suggesting more music being required, then I strenuously disagree. I absolutely hated elementary school music class, and probably would have dropped out of school if I was required to take anything music-related after that.
@Procrustus I second your opinion.
And I third it!
We had music all through elementary school. Back in the 60’s that consisted of the teacher rolling in the big black and white TV and we’d watch a show on PBS. There was a lady at a piano and we had the same book as she did. All we did was sing along as far as I can remember. Then we were required to take a music class the first year of junior high - 7th grade. I did not want to learn an instrument and I did not want to sing in the choir. So the rest of us took Music Appreciation. I don’t remember a single thing we did in that class. I love listening to music, but I would not want to be forced to make music.
I remember junior high music class, which was more about music appreciation than actually making music. We learned about the parts of a song (the chorus, the riff and so forth). It helped that the teacher used popular songs (rock, for example) in these examples. And when teaching us about opera, she used The Who’s Tommy as an example. This was the days of reel-to-reel tape recorders (graduated high school in 1984, to give you an idea when this was) so we had a lesson in creating sound effects and splicing and editing tapes. I still remember many of those lessons.
I didn’t have any music classes in school. I went to Catholic school through eighth grade, and in, IIRC, the seventh grade, those students became the “choir” for church. There wasn’t any training. You just practiced singing hymns. I had a bunch of “troublemakers” in my class, and we were actually kicked out of the choir. There were two seventh grade classes, so the other one took over the singing duties. They were a bunch of goodie goodies.
In junior/senior high school any music classes were electives. I didn’t take any.
My 7th grade music class began with us learning how to play the ukulele. So bring ukuleles?
That music teacher died unexpectedly the day after he led a choir concert, and was replaced with a cute music teacher just out of college. She had us listen to and analyze Jesus Christ Superstar. We weren’t a parochial school; it was because it had just been released. I ended up loving learning just why JCSS was so popular.
Now, here’s what should be brought back: it had the lyrics in a booklet, so bring back full sized record albums and the inserts they used to have (and not just for vinyl diehards).
This sounds cool, and also age-appropriate. It seems that school has become, especially with all the standardized testing, more about rote repetition, and has very little to do with learning how to learn.
great grandma didn’t have a piano but she had an organ that was the size of a small computer desk that fi in the corner of the room and she played mainly hymns and patriotic music but when the little kids shed have us sing all the kindergartner songs, she was dismayed that my hands couldn’t bend the right way to play that or a piano …
I am convinced of that. 
Really sucks because I have an ideal way in my head of how to give my kid more freedom and it’s thwarted by:
- Changing cultural norms which could get me arrested for free-ranging my kid,
And
- A kid with limited danger awareness that is developmentally behind his actual age.
So even though I don’t want to be that parent, I have to be that parent.
We moved from a house in an okay neighborhood surrounded by dangerous areas to one a half a block from a big park with a great playground when my kids were 8 and 11. My older child loved going to the park by herself to play on the swings and generally hang out, thinking thoughts. I would have been fine with letting both of them go alone, but my younger child was totally the kid who would get in the stranger’s van to help him find his puppy, so I’d always have to go with her. (Her big sister meant well, but she’s easily distracted and couldn’t really be relied on to stay vigilant.)