Discovery School's Online PuzzleMaker

I didn't do my 2K this morning because I wanted to be at work early. The train schedule on the weekend is horrible. Instead of two train lines, one going between 33rd Street and Journal Square while the other serves 33rd Street and Hoboken, the two lines are combined, running in a triangle between the three stations. The wait seems like forever, then when the train gets to Hoboken it would sit there for maybe ten minutes. One time it took me two hours to get to work - left the house at 8am and got to work at 10. Today it was an hour and a half. Other than the horrible train service, working on Saturday has the lovely perk of not being interrupted by my clients, who normally work Monday to Friday.

To help my son review his vocabulary words, I looked for computer programs that make word search puzzles. There was some piece that would do a lot more than word search puzzles, but then I came across Discovery School's Puzzlemaker, to be used online and free of charge. There's a downloadable version too but it's not Mac-compatible. I hope my son will enjoy playing them as I enjoy making them.

With my colleague Purple's birthday just a few days ago, I thought I would make this week's "toon" a word search puzzle instead of the usual doodling. She loves the color purple (that's why she's nicknamed "Purple" in Qaptain Qwerty's world) so the puzzle's title is All Things Purple. I came up with ten or so items purple-related while Purple and Teary contributed the rest. I handprinted the puzzle on the white board with a fine-tipped dry erase marker. The "picture" came out very light, probably wouldn't show if captured with a camera, so I printed the Word document to PDF at work then convert the PDF to JPG on the Mac. Only after all was done that I found out some of the phrases are not real. What's a purple duct tape? My friend Purple said it's duct tape that's purple. D'oh! I suppose we can throw in purple house, purple purse, and so on, anything that can be made purple! But that's not what I meant. It should have been just figure of speech, idioms, song or movie titles, etc. Not things that just happened to be painted purple or manufactured to be purple.