Pack It In

Answer: LUNCHBOX

With the grid solved, a 1 or 2, but the grid will be hard to solve without backsolving with the meta answer in hand, so... Nice one yet again!

Lol. I first thought of RAN free, RAN late, and RANsack ... yeah, that's how my brain works! But "RAN (a) light" just wasn't gonna get me very far!... Then my stomach said "LUNCH" and I was there! Gotta go with the gut! hahaha...

Nice one, thanks Mikey!

First puzzle I solved before the deadline without hints, very fun :D

I love puzzles that play with conventional format and rebuses, so this one was really a treat for me! (no pun intended again, how do I keep doing this lol)

Tough! Figured out the answer but had to back solve to finish the grid. INERT and TRICYCLE just didn't work!

Easy meta, HARD grid! Still don't understand RTS -- I tried so hard to make it RBS (I think that's a football thing?) Now I want second lunch!

Lunch! I’m in. Thanks Mikey.

The grid was really rough until I realized there were rebuses. What did it for me was not being able to fill the top left corner, and realizing I needed FREEZE/FREELY. Then that made the top right corner make more sense, so by the time I got to HIGHLIGHTREEL it went smooth like butter. The hardest was the "Dormant"/"On deck" crossing. I always take "on deck" to mean "up next" like in baseball, so I was super surprised to see the suggestions from thesaurus.com. Grid is a 4, meta a 2.

The answer was my first thought on seeing sack -- but I got waylaid thinking that the other rebus entries had to be things like bag, tote, etc. Revealed the SLATED/LATENT square to find out that wasn't the case, and carried on from there. I did vaguely wonder about the unusual grid too. Thanks for 'splainin' that! And thanks for the back to school puzzle; I think I'm go with a Paw Patrol one this year!

Not familiar with “sack lunch” so wasn’t quite sure!

Fun one...thanks Mikey!

I should have been able to think of how to actually solve it. Instead, I took a guess based on the title and prompt. "Pack It In" made me think of "lunch" and there's only 1 8-letter noun often seen at school that fits.

The two hardest parts were filling the grid and trying to infer the right word. LUNCHEON, MEALTIME, CHOWTIME....finally I said, well Mikey probably didn't just leave it to chance, I mean he had a lunchbox shape to point us to lunch (as opposed to FREE, SACK, LATE, LIGHT Sleeper)...hey a LUNCHBOX 8 letters, pack it in, DOH!!! Nice Level 1, that is what made it a temporary challenge because I was waiting for a square to point me to the end (pack it in) which would point me to an anagram which would translate from Klingon to an 8 letter noun.

Glad it wasn't that!

I solved the grid without backsolving, but I must admit I never saw the LUNCH in a Box thing until you mentioned it Mikey.

Tried a number of different things, but then got hung up on LUNCHBAG (because you pack stuff in a bag, right)? Finally took another look and found the right answer. Thanks for the puzzle, Mikey!

Had to reveal for 9D — I had G (right guard) instead of the T, thinking the 9D word would end in ing (so the rebus had to end with an I) — that should have cued me in (SMH). This brought back great memories… my fave was called Campus Queen and its artwork featured a 60’s young woman going to school, getting dressed up for a date, going to a football game… man I wish I still had that lunchbox!!

Maybe it's a generational thing and everyone younger than me (i.e., everyone) is familiar with the phrase "sack lunch," but that's the one that kept me from getting this sooner. I took a "bag lunch" on school trips. Maybe it's a regional thing -- Pittsburgh. That bag lunch was secured with "gum bands."

Being an economist, I had great difficulty making sense of the first rebus square... ;)

I thought it was a cat! Haha