Chance Takes a Holiday

I think most of you know about The Puzzle Boat. I just got back from Boston where TPB creator foggyb invited me to the kickoff party.

The party was a great opportunity to visit with many Hub locals in one place. Foggy explained that TPB was an on-line extravaganza that could be solved alone or in teams at whatever pace that the solvers choose. He then divided the group into teams to solve five sample puzzles. I was pleased to be on a team with thedan who had just returned from Hungary on his first foray with the World Puzzle Championship. Dan took care of a logic puzzle, the others on our team worked on a phonetic word puzzle, and I stared at some emoticons for a long time before figuring out what was going on. Foggy claimed that the puzzles he chose for the party were ones that did not require research, but there was one of the puzzles that had most teams poking through Foggy’s closet for help.

After the solving, Sprout volunteered to run a pub trivia set for the guests that remained. I caught onto the bonus movie theme fairly quickly and was able to use it to verify a couple of answers down the line. Ultimately we were undone by ignorance of sports (particularly professional soccer) and Sydney-or-the-Bush bet on the final bonus question in biology.

The rest of my trip to Boston was low-key, mainly due to the inclement weather. The sun eventually came out, but the temperature was generally cool. I first stayed with lemurtanis and all of her cool housemates, where I got to play cards (which I haven’t done in months), practice “feng shuwine,” and learn a lot about what it’s like to be a “Jeopardy!” contestant. While staying with hathor I had another unforgettable evening I can’t quite remember. toonhead_npl and I also offered to carry Hathor’s window air conditioner down to the garage. When deciding how to navigate the stairs, I asked Joe if he preferred to be a backward or a forward but he said it was none of my business. Sprout was my host for the last leg of the trip. I found out he knows a lot about squares. I also felt that our conversation split of general life topics and shop talk/pop culture spew is basically fifty-fifty – perhaps the best example of an even split of all the Krewe that I know.

I walked a bit around Cambridge and ended up on the MIT campus, where I instinctively located my headquarters from last January’s Hunt. I had predictably enjoyable lunch with saxikath in the South End. And was very pleased to have the chance to visit with tahnan at the Diesel while he was polishing his dissertation.

Oh, and while I flirted with airport karma by getting on the wrong Silver Line bus at South Station, I actually made my plane for the return home!