84 across: complete

I just finished a New York Times crossword puzzle, allowing me to check off No. 84 from my list.

Except for Daily Tar Heel crosswords, which kept me and everyone else sane in huge lecture classes, I've never been that big on them. But for the past couple of weeks I've been doing the ones in the News & Observer. I usually can finish the weekday puzzles (with some help from Matt on the sports questions) but the Sunday ones are doozies.

This is the first one I've done online and I like that method (the delete key is cleaner than an eraser, which I use a lot). The only downside is you can't see all of the clues at once -- you have to scroll up and down -- but I thought that was pretty easy to get used to.

In case you're wondering, I did cheat using the Internet (although not a crossword-cheating site, just Google). And yes, I feel a little guilty counting this as a goal achieved when I didn't do it on my own, but I'm going to anyway because a) I'm not sure I'm edu-macated enough to EVER finish one entirely on my own and b) my list didn't stipulate that I finish it without help; all I was going for was a piece of paper with 9 square inches of filled-in blocks, and that I have.