Seven Letter Word for Awesome

I like crosswords. I like them even more when I can finish them. The New York Times crossword gets progressively harder as the week goes by, so Monday is a breeze and makes me feel like I belong in the gifted class, but by Sunday, I feel like I can't even spell 'gifted'.

One of my goals for 2011 is to complete a Sunday NYT crossword. Here is the first Sunday crossword of the year. Abysmal. To my defence, I only write in pen so if I'm not 100% sure of an answer, I don't fill it in. Still, this is embarrassing.

I can only hope that the last one of the year has a lot more ink.

As an aside, I once created my own crossword for my friend Katy as it was a favourite pastime of ours. Let me tell you, they are really hard to make!! Nearly impossible. In fact, several clues read like this: "Uh, sorry, I can't come up with a clue" or "Yikes! Sorry, Katy, it's too hard - what is a clue for Nrx?" Some of the 'words' didn't really work out.