My morning routine is pretty simple. Wordle. NYT crossword puzzle. Put up a blog post. Get on with my life.

Wordle takes no time at all. Crossword – depends on the day and the puzzle. Blog post – varies, dependent on whether I started (or finished) it the night before, and whether I have any idea what I am going to write about.

This morning, Wordle was easy. But I couldn’t finish the Times puzzle. At all. Why? Because I like a crossword puzzle that has clues and squares and each square gets one letter, and your job is figure out which one letter goes into each square. But some puzzles are not like that. They are more “tricky”. There was a puzzle last week, for example, where the “trick” was that a bunch of words needed to have “qq” written into them in consecutive squares. Now, I don’t know of any words containing two consecutive “qs”, and there were none in the puzzle. The second “q” was the sound “q”. An example? Okay, not in the puzzle, but imagine the definition is “Baghdad beauty”. The answer would be “Iraqqtie”. See what I mean?

Today’s NYT Sunday puzzle was that way. You work and work on it like it’s a normal puzzle and then, after almost an hour, you say “I give up” and then you go and look at the answer. And you are just disgusted. Okay, so maybe you should have figured out sooner that this was not a normal puzzle and either stopped then (cause you don’t like the other kind), or really tried to figure out the trick (which I still don’t understand).

Examples from today: Clue: sailor’s patron. Okay, you know that is St. Elmo, but you only have four letters. So you assume it is Elmo. But, no. It is S T [Elm] O. The famous lawyer in the Scopes trial is C L A R E N [ced] A R R O W. Lemonade and iced tea is A R N O L D [Palm] E R. When you are wet, you say I A M S [oak] E D. And so forth.

All of these crunched squares are trees (or in the [ced] case, part of the name of a tree). And you are supposed to figure this out because 69-down is “Where to find six presents in this puzzle” and the answer is “Under the tree”.

I just don’t get it. And, by the way, there was a lot else in this puzzle I didn’t get. How many of you can name the “2015 chart topping hit for the Weeknd”? It was Can’t Feel My Face! But that would be too easy, so in the puzzle it was C A N T F E [Elm] Y F A C E.

The author of the puzzle is a fellow named David Kwong and he is apparently a professional magician. My guess is that David Kwong and I have never had one common thought.

Enough of that…..

Here’s another mistake (sort of). For the last two weeks, we have gone out to dinner at out of the way restaurants. No reason. Small, hole-in-the-wall places, not near us (maybe 10 miles away) that I might have passed on an excursion and looked up on Yelp and saw that they got good ratings and said, “let’s give it a try”. Last week, it was the Filo Cafe, a Philippine restaurant, and last night we went to Ethiopios, and you can guess what kind of a restaurant that was.

We went to Ethiopios, which is located in small strip center in Rockville, because I had eaten lunch earlier this week at a Yunnan Rice Noodle shop in the same strip, and found it a unique and interesting experience, not like any other Chinese restaurant I had been in, and I saw there was a Jamaican restaurant and an Ethiopian restaurant in the same strip and thought we should give at least one of them a try.

Ethiopios has about a dozen tables, and there was only one other occupied (by a family of four) while we were there, but they were doing a good carry out business. There were six or seven people (mainly Uber Eats types) who came in to pick up orders. The restaurant itself is very plainly decorated. Its menu like most other Ethiopian restaurants (there are many, many in the DC area) and we ordered our usual vegetarian plate. There were seven vegetable concoctions spread out on a large injera. They were all pretty good (if not the best we have ever had). There were two cold dishes, one from beets and one from lentils, two warm bean dishes (one spicy, one not), a cabbage/potato combination, a string bean/carrot combination, and a serving of greens, maybe collards. For the two of us, it was only $20 plus tax and tip.

But, it’s a very informal place. The woman who serves you must also work in the kitchen, because she is never visible unless she is taking an order, serving, etc. To get her, you have to ring the bell on the counter. There was quite a bit of bell ringing last night. When the bell is rung, her standard answer was “Just a minute”, and she would generally come out after the second ringing.

The other interesting facet of the restaurant was that the heating didn’t seem to be working. The thermostat on the wall said that the temperature was 61 degrees. I asked her if she could up the heat and she said something in a combination of Amharic and English that meant “No, I can’t, it’s broken”, or “The thermostat is on the wall. Move it where you want.” One or the other, or maybe something else. I couldn’t tell. And I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t understand her, so I didn’t ring the bell again for that. I pushed up and down buttons, and something called menu and lo and behold I set the temperature at 78, which I knew was too warm, but I couldn’t move it back down for some reason. There was then a message on the thermostat that said “Temperature set at 78 degrees” and another that said “Temporarily on hold” that I couldn’t eliminate.

At any rate, the temperature stayed at 61/62, and we kept our coats on, and that turned out to be okay.

We had gone fairly early, and got home in time to see the last three episodes of Season 3 of The Diplomat. Waiting for Season 4 next September. Hope the country lasts that long (both on The Diplomat and in the Trumposphere).

How did I do? Only mentioned him once today. Pretty good, huh?