Yeah, I've caught the Sudoku bug. I ran across the simple yet perfect Sudoku Companion on accident the other day and gave the game another try. The first time I saw Sudoku in a newspaper, I filled out the obvious numbers and assumed the rest was an exercise in simple logic, that everything would just fall into place once you filled in enough squares--say, a third of the board. That, or it would be trial and error all the way down, like those super irritating "magic squares" we used to do. Unfortunately, it's not that simple, there's plenty of interesting higher-level thought involved, and now I'm hooked. I went from doing the medium difficulty puzzles to "fiendish" over the weekend and can do the daily puzzle in around 20 minutes now.

Thing is, though, I can't tell if I'm actually having fun or not. It's not FUN! fun, but it's something to do, and my brain gets some kind of primitive behavior-reinforcing reward when I complete a puzzle. I don't have to think about what I want to do for another half hour. But then what? Start a new one? This is starting to replace Google News or pinging the AP feeds on Salon as my compulsive time waster. I think I need to set some limits.