TODAY’S WORRY
It was never my intention to get started doing sudoku. I’ve always figured I’m a crossword puzzle kind of girl and eschewed anything with numbers. After all, to do crosswords you need a broad range of trivia from foreign words to geography to arcane definitions – a thinking person’s kind of idle time filler. I also thought that sudoku had something to do with math. Not my strong suit.
On the way home from Florida, the Southwest Airlines magazine had 4 sudoku. Well, I had nothing but idle time so I read the instructions and lo and behold, no math was involved. The numbers are really just distinct place holders. You could use letters or colors or any bunch of 9 different things. So I tried the easy ones and did them. Then I tried the intermediate one and did it. Then I solved the hard one although that took me a while. I was hooked.
A sudoku grid is nine by nine. Nine columns of nine numbers, nine rows of nine numbers and nine 3 x 3 boxes of nine numbers. You just have to make sure that there are no repetitions of a number in any column, row or box. I found a website where you can find sudoku. There are plenty to be had as the number of possible ways to fill a 9-by-9 sudoku grid is calculated at 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960. My measured time doing one online makes me slower than 96% of people who do sudoku. But, no worries, by the time I get through doing 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 I’m sure I’ll be faster.