Emily's Musings

Solved!

Our big puzzle day event is done and I think by all accounts it was a great success. We'll see what the feedback forms say and what press coverage we get tomorrow (both the MH Times and the Merc sent reporters and photographers), but I think people had fun and people did very well on the tournament puzzles. Here are a couple of photos, many more will be up later on the Puzzle Day web site (I'll also post the tournament puzzles there later if you want to see how you would have done).

Here's me with Byron Walden, who not only wrote our final puzzle and talked to the group over lunch about the puzzle he has published in today's NY Times, but he even spent the whole afternoon helping out with the tournament scoring!

Our Sudoku and crossword champions (they each had to solve the final puzzle against two other finalists on dry erase boards in front of the whole room)

Our "marketplace" with vendors selling books, games, etc.

Shachar was the official "go out and pick up things we forgot" go-to guy who ended up running errands to get the t-shirts, hotdogs, more copies, books and games I forgot at home, and various other things. Not to mention LOTS of help in the weeks of prep as we figured out how to make the giant puzzle boards, stock up on food to sell and various other things (plus generally putting up with me spending so many hours on this event)

We had 22 people compete in the Sudoku tournaments (3 rounds and the final) and 28 or so in the crossword (4 rounds and the final). We also had a series of workshops running all day and all sorts of other things going on, including a huge troupe of high school volunteers running around proctoring the puzzles and selling food and other things. Not surprisingly, I'm utterly exhausted from all that and am going to crash.

Oh, and we got a great article in the San Jose Mercury News: "Puzzle junkies compete at library fundraiser" by Julie Patel

If Morgan Hill's Puzzle Day was any indication, the East Coast better watch out.

``We're going to show them there's a strong crossword community on the West Coast too,'' Emily Reich Shem-Tov, an event volunteer, told a library full of puzzle fans.

Word.