New York Times, Wednesday, March 3, 2021

A very late "Happy Lunar New Year!" to you all! I'm so excited to be making my New York Times Crossword debut.

I started solving crosswords at the beginning of 2020, and transitioned to constructing in March just as quarantine was kicking off. As a university student, it was a great way to fill a spring break with nowhere to go.

I owe a lot of thanks to everyone who used their constructor notes to encourage people interested in learning to construct (Erik Agard and Ross Trudeau come to mind), without whom my ideas would never have left the recesses of my notes app. I also want to give an especially big shoutout to Rich Proulx for patiently mentoring me over dozens of emails!

A fun fact about the clue for 26-down: the only other use of "wine-dark" by Homer is to describe oxen, an extra nod to the theme. I was also a little sad to lose my original clue for PEWS ("Laser gun noises"), but my favorite out of many great new clues by the editing team was definitely 25-Down.

I used to hate Chinese New Year as a kid. The red envelopes were awesome, but when the teacher would make the Asian kids stand up and say what year we were born in, I cringed. Year of the dragon was the dream, followed closely by the tiger. Heck, I'd gladly take horse. Dog. Even rooster or snake would have been passable.

After all the laughing would subside, the teacher would clear her throat and try to research what wonderful traits Zodiac pigs exhibited. Let's see … the emperor summoned all the animals, and 11 showed up. Just as he was about to call it quits, the pig squealed in. Turns out the rascal got hungry, ate some trash, then fell asleep. Lazy, disgusting, boorish. Great.

Things would always go downhill from there, until I realized I could fool the throngs of non-Asian kids by telling them I was born in the year of the T. Rex.

Fantastic to see the Zodiac honored today with a well-disguised set of OX terms. I did wonder if STEERS was the proper plural of STEER, but Dictionary.com says it's correct. Solid job obfuscating STEERS, BULL, and CATTLE in colorful phrases.

Also great is the tightness factor. What other themers could work? There is STOCK OPTIONS, but what else? No phrases start with COW that use it in a different sense.

Extremely impressed with Ann's gridwork! With four themers, I expect constructors to deliver at least four pieces of strong bonus fill, along with little to no glue. Ann hit on both counts, going the extra mile with CHEESE GRATER, FIRESIDE CHAT, along with SCENARIO, ELOQUENT, ENIGMAS, GALILEO, and more.

A 72-word grid is not for the faint of heart, usually requiring some themeless expertise to make it work. Beautiful big corners in the NW and SE! No secret to executing on a FIRESIDE CHAT / ELOQUENT / REDSTONE (not a Minecraft player, but the two words were easy enough to figure out) triplet. Few constructors have the patience for all the iteration needed, though.

I would have preferred this puzzle to run on Chinese New Year, but it's still an impressive debut. While the theme is tried-and-true "hidden synonyms," I thoroughly enjoyed the nod to the heritage that I've slowly come to accept, as well as the outstanding debut gridwork.