Shelling pea season happens (on the Planet Ann Arbor) approximately the last couple weeks of June. Spelling bee season happens every day.

The first word puzzle I do every morning is the NYT Spelling Bee. About five days a week, I get to Queen Bee 👸🐝. I *always* get to genius, the level below Queen Bee. Once I get to genius, I open the “grid”, which tells me how many words start with each possible 2-letter combination (“la”, “so”, etc.) and the number of letters in each word starting with a letter. (Stop right now if this is hurting your brain. I’m doing a terrible job of explaining it.)

The grid often helps me get to Queen Bee without looking at the *comments* [long story deleted]. The only time I look at the comments is the next morning if I didn’t reach Queen Bee the day before. Sometimes I end up slapping my forehead with a big “duh”, as in why didn’t I get that one? Other times, there are obscure words. “Oppugn/Oppugning” is pretty obscure in my book and I sure didn’t get it a few days ago. “Popgun” I should’ve gotten.

Watch out for words like “nankeen”, “torii”, and “dugong” and I can’t think of any others right now. (That sentence contains a spoiler for today’s bee.) I do know “torii” because there is one at the Soo Locks park and I grew up with that particular torii.

The bee in the pic is from Wednesday. It is the 2,500th bee. It contains an SSSSSSSS. I have never seen an “S” in a spelling bee before and had to stare at it for a few minutes to process it. “S” is not usually included, I think mainly because of all the plural possibilities. On the other hand “ed” and “ing” endings are often included in the bee. Sometimes both of them. There were plurals in this puzz but all in all, it worked well.

I did get to Queen Bee with this unusual “s” letter group. I got there *almost* by myself. But. I did look at the comments. That was mainly because I was really astounded by the “s” and wanted to read what others thought. But the one word I didn’t have was “flus”, as in, there are a lot of “flus” going around (influenza viruses) and my eye picked up “flus” so I finished Queen Bee and reported it to my daughters with an “asterisk” (i.e., I peeked). I have my own opinions about the word “flus” (“strains of flu” maybe) but I guess it is a common enough usage to be included in the bee. On the other hand, I don’t like to think of “doggo” (another spoiler) as a real word but maybe I’m just being grouchy.

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