The other family addiction

In my family we like to do crossword puzzles.  Everyone except my mom. She does stuff that is actually useful while the rest of us do puzzles.   My dad and all my sibs and I like to do them, and we really like to do them as a tag team.  Our favorite is to get one that's too hard for any of us, work on it and pass it around.  But any two of us will do that, as my dad and I have been doing today.  He has a book of puzzles edited by Will Shortz (a gift from my niece that likes to do home repair projects with her dad),  that proceed from easy to harder to really danged hard to probably would require 50 of us to finish..  He's in the middle of that book, so he and I can handle most of them together at that level.  BUT if we get to the next level, we will need some help.  And next year, sometime in the summer, we all hope to be together for a family gathering celebrating my dad's 80th, my mom's 75th, my sister's 50th, my brother's 40th, and my nephew's and my son's 10th birthdays!  All in 2011.  So there will definitely be some puzzle passing at that event.
My son and my dad worked on a web-site today that kids can use to create a crossword puzzle.  They didn't complete it, as the weather was too beautiful to stay indoors.  There were just too many distractions.  Shortly thereafter the activities included jumping on the trampoline while the sprinkler was spraying away underneath it, (that would be the kids, not my dad), drinking wine (that would be me), grilling some salmon (also me), and eating the salmon (that would be all of us.)

The kids went to spend the night with their dad, who also drank wine and ate salmon with us, and now my dad and I are working on crossword puzzles to our hearts' contents.  Mom is in Chicago visiting some relatives, and so it is pretty quiet on the western front of Normal.