I attended my second American Crossword Puzzle Tournament this weekend. Socially, it was wonderful — I got to reconnect with old friends and make new ones, and a couple of people even recognized my name from my NYT puzzle with Derek Bowman a couple months ago.

As for my performance: it’s complicated.

Last year I came in 105th out of 674, making the top 16%. My goal this year was to do better than that. During the last two weeks I did a lot of prep: I did dozens of crosswords. On paper. As fast as possible. I tried to get better at reading more than one clue at a time to speed things up. And: at previous tournaments, ACPT and Lollapuzzoola, I ruined several potentially perfect grids by making stupid errors, thereby forfeiting valuable bonus points. So I vowed that this time I’d check my grids before turning them in, making sure nothing looked obviously wrong. I was going to do better.

And I achieved my goal — I came in 95th out of 741, in the top 13%.

Now, if someone had told me going in that that would be my result, I’d have been thrilled. But instead I was really annoyed at myself, because of how I got there.

After the first four puzzles of the tournament, I was actually in 20th place out of 741 people. My puzzles were all error-free. I was so, so happy. All my efforts were paying off.

And then Puzzle 5 happened.

Puzzle 5 is traditionally the hardest, trickiest puzzle of the seven-puzzle tournament. This year it was by Evan Birnolz, constructor of the weekly Sunday Washington Post crossword. I love Evan’s puzzles, and I’ve met him in person — he’s a great guy. But for some reason, I was just not on the wavelength of this puzzle. I couldn’t figure out the theme. I first noticed something was weird when I tried to write down ROMA and the A was conflicting with the I in PHONE BILL. I couldn’t figure out why. Was it a rebus? Was I supposed to enter both letters in the square? Then in another part of the puzzle, the R in A MINOR clashed with the E in TEST (as in “Beta TEST,” or so I thought). What the hell? I kept re-reading the puzzle title and the blurb and trying to figure out what they meant and why the hell this puzzle wasn’t coming together for me, as the minutes kept passing and I started panicking more and more. Finally I had the whole grid at least filled in, and I realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere by spending more time looking over the grid and losing more points as the time continued passing (you lose points the longer you take). So I decided to cut my losses and turn it in.

Ultimately that puzzle wound up being a total car crash for me. I had THIRTEEN wrong squares. Before puzzle 5, I’d been ranked 20th; after puzzle 5, I fell to 138th. Jesus. I learned after the fact what the theme was. But I just hadn’t been able to figure it out.

Next was puzzle 6, and I rebounded. It was nice and smooth, and I completed it error-free. That was a relief — but I still felt so glum the rest of the evening about puzzle 5.

Sunday morning was puzzle 7, and again – no errors!

So ultimately, puzzles 6 and 7 pushed my ranking back up to 95th place. And if I’d known before this weekend that that’s where I’d rank, I would have been really happy. But if I’d known how I would get there… I don’t know.

Puzzle 5 was a total mess for me and it ruined my score. But on the other hand, I’ve clearly improved my fundamental crosswording skills since my last tournament. I completed six puzzles without stupid errors and with great times. I did well enough that even with my disaster, I still finished in the top 100.

There’s always next year. And more importantly, I got to hang out with terrific people for a whole weekend. Ultimately, nobody else but me cares how I ranked. Making friends and spending time with great people is more important than a crossword tournament ranking.

But I’ll conquer you next year, puzzle 5.

The total eclipse was amazing.

I learned more than a year ago that there’d be a total solar eclipse from coast to coast in August 2017, and I saw that my inlaws’ house was just within the path of totality, so I’d thought for a while about going down to visit them. In the last few weeks I started to think about it more seriously, and I decided that if the weather forecasts a few days beforehand for the big day looked good, I’d do it. Last week it seemed like there might be thunderstorms on Monday, but as it got closer to the day, the forecast turned clear. Finally, on Thursday morning, I bought a plane ticket to Chattanooga. I flew down on Sunday afternoon. Matt couldn’t make it because it’s a busy time of year at work for him, and at any rate, he didn’t think it was a big deal!

My inlaws live just north of Chattanooga. Last week they scoped out Dayton, TN, which is about 20 miles north of their house and would get 2 minutes and 21 seconds of totality. So yesterday morning, we drove up there, beating the traffic, and set up a standing tent in a ballfield around 10 a.m., along with chairs, a table, and a cooler full of food. I was with my inlaws, my brother-in-law, and some close friends of my inlaws who I’ve gotten to know over the years. Only one other car was there when we arrived, but as the morning went on, more people showed up. It was never crowded – we were on the edge of a big field with plenty of empty space.

The weather was perfect: a totally clear sky, with just a few clouds only at the horizon. A puffy white cloud did pass overhead at one point as the partial eclipse progressed, but it went by pretty quickly and never covered the sun.

We walked around a bit and got to chat with some of our fellow viewers. There were some locals and some people from farther away. One woman had driven up by herself from Mississippi, and she called herself a “weather nerd.” She had chemo last year and had decided that if she survived to this year, she’d come up and see the total eclipse. There was a couple who came with a tripod and camera and recorded the whole eclipse from start to finish.

The eclipse was an awesome experience, literally.

At around 1 pm, through my eclipse glasses, I could just barely make out a concavity in the sun, so subtle that I thought maybe I was imagining it. But then it became more visible and more defined. For the next hour-plus, the chunk got bigger and bigger.

Totality was scheduled to begin at 2:31. About 15 minutes beforehand, the quality of the light around us started to change. It got dimmer, but in a way I’d never experienced before. I felt like I was on another planet, under an alien sun. As the light continued to grow dim, I began to feel like I was wearing sunglasses, even though I wasn’t.

The sun had been beating down on us all day, but now it wasn’t very hot at all.

The strains of a bagpipe played in the distance. It added to the contemplative atmosphere.

It got to be 2:30. Through my eclipse glasses, the visible sliver of sun in the sky got smaller and smaller, until suddenly it disappeared, and we were in a total eclipse! Everyone cheered. We all took off our eclipse glasses.

I looked up and a black circle had blotted out the sun, just like in all the pictures I’d seen. I could see the corona very clearly. I tried to take a quick photo, but it didn’t come out well at all.

I looked around me. It was twilight, with a 360-degree sunset. A bright star or planet was visible to the right of the sun. The lights in the nearby parking lot came on. A couple of cars on the road drove by using their headlights.

We began to hear crickets. A radio played “Sunglasses At Night” and then “Dancing in the Moonlight.” In the far distance, I saw fireworks.

I lay down on the grass and looked up at the eclipse. Just looked at it.

And then, too soon, the Baily’s Beads and diamond ring began to appear and the sun started to re-emerge. I put my eclipse glasses back on. It was over. The 141 seconds had passed by so fast. It all happened too quickly. There was so much to see and experience and feel and not enough time for it all.

Slowly the sky began to grow lighter, the crickets began to stop, the daytime bugs started up their songs once more, and the air gradually grew warmer. About half an hour later, things felt sadly normal again.

It was an amazing day, and I’m so glad I got to experience it. I’m ready to see another one!

On Twitter today I saw a link to a blog post by a woman who wrote that she has cancelled her family’s trip to Walt Disney World because Disney is including a gay character in the new live-action “Beauty and the Beast” movie.

Today, she wrote about the hate mail she received.

I left a comment on that post. I don’t know if the comment will get approved, but here’s what I wrote.

* * * *

Hi. I don’t know you. I’m sorry that someone called you a pig. It can be startling when you write something for your usual friendly audience and it somehow goes viral and gets read and shared by lots of people who don’t normally read your blog. That can happen on the internet. But it’s wrong for someone to call you a pig. People have every right to disagree with you and tell you why you’re misguided, but it’s not helpful to call you names.

Insults aside, it might be useful for you to try and understand why people criticized you.

For one thing, you said you were “forced” to cancel your Disney World vacation. But you weren’t forced to. You chose to. Framing it as something you were “forced” to do makes it sound like you’re trying to portray yourself as a victim.

Second, you said that the reason you decided not to go Disney World is because you don’t like the fact that some men love men and some women love women. Sorry, but that’s a very silly thing to be uncomfortable with. Being gay doesn’t hurt you or your children or anybody else. It doesn’t make the world a worse place. In fact, it makes the world a better place, because when people are allowed to be who they are – when they are happier, and when the things that make them happier do not harm themselves or other people – the world’s net happiness is increased. It seems puzzling that someone would be against increasing net happiness.

You also seem confused about what Disney is doing. It’s not like Disney is going to show gay sex on screen. Do they show heterosexual sex on screen? Do we ever see Prince Eric being sexually intimate with Ariel, Prince Charming having sex with Snow White? No. Little kids don’t need to know about sex. But we’re not talking about sex. We’re talking about portraying someone who has feelings for someone of the same gender. Human love. That’s all.

Third, and here’s a big one: plenty of people who have the same opinion about gay people as you do have done actual harm to gay people over the years. They condemned their gay fellow human beings who contracted HIV and died of AIDS in the 1980s. Instead of giving compassion and – more importantly – funding for anti-AIDS research, they criticized them and told them they were going to hell. More recently, people who hold your beliefs actively worked to try and prevent us from getting married. Getting married is a pinnacle of human happiness, but people actually tried to keep us from realizing that happiness. They didn’t want me to marry my husband. What kind of a person would try and prevent such a thing?

Fourth, you don’t just talk about your beliefs in your post. You actually encourage action. You tell people to sign petitions and participate in a boycott to try and prevent Disney from providing role models for little boys and girls that are going to grow up to be gay. Do you know that LGBT teens have a higher-than-average rate of suicide? Why are you against something that is going to make the young version of me that much less scared to grow up and be who he or she is? Why are you trying to prevent this?

There are plenty of Christians who do embrace gay people and support our full rights as citizens. I would ask how you reconcile your beliefs with the willingness to take action that hurts an entire segment of your fellow human beings.

I guess you don’t see it that way. I imagine you’re probably a good person in many ways. You love your family and your children. It’s great that you feed the poor and clothe the hungry. I honestly mean that: it’s more than most people do. But you seem willing to take action that will harm millions of other people, just because of your feelings.

It was still wrong for someone to call you a pig. But maybe you could try a little better to understand where other people are coming from.