During my week off a couple of weeks ago, I was "forced" to construct and mount
a bunch of new Billy bookcases with doors in my second puzzle room. Whilst this
is a wonderful thing and I WILL be forever grateful to the present wife for
allowing/forcing this on me. But...it did mean that the week of leave was filled
with DIY and chores and gardening (plus a little private practice which helps me
pay for my rather expensive addiction) and I did not get to do much puzzling and
did not manage to generate a nice cushion of solved toys to write about.
Watching this is like watching paint dry!
The first day back at work did give me a little time (actually quite a lot of
time) to try and get something in the bag for the blog. That day was a
vascular list to be done down in the bowels of the hospital (no sunlight, cold
and with no prospect of a break or early release. The case was a very elderly
frail lady with a rather large aortic aneurysm to be
repaired endovascularly using a rather complex
multi-branched fenestrated graft. Now, I know that you don't really want to know about that but it helps
explain the very depths of my boredom. I am a bit of an excitement freak - I
like big juicy and bloody operations that require me to concentrate and keep
resuscitating as well as anaesthetising. I do a lot of large open vascular
operations, big spinal operations (including scoliosis repair) and lots of
revision arthroplasty which tends to prevent not only boredom but also puzzling. That fateful
Monday, I discovered (again) that absolutely NOTHING interesting happens
during a FEVAR! Nothing happened of any interest to me (apart from
intermittent requests to stop the patient breathing for a minute at a time)
for over 7½ hours. When you do your very first one it is moderately
interesting but now after a decade of doing them, I have lost the ability to
watch them moving a wire back and forth on an Xray screen for hours at a time.
I only have a tiny mind according to "she who frightens the bejeezus out of
everyone" and that tiny mind had left the building about 4 hours in. It was
puzzling time!
In my bag there are always toys just in case. Sometimes it is to torture
colleagues , sometimes to torture med students whilst I do a chore that can't
involve them and I'm always hopeful that I might get a little time to play
myself. The Karakuri packing puzzle from Yasuhiro-san had been waiting my
attention for months. Allard had
absolutely loved it and others I had met at the MPP had also said that it was fabulous.
That Monday was my time and the pressure was on - I had to solve it before I
lost my mind completely and also because the delightful Libby was watching me
as I worked on it and asking rather pertinent questions. I couldn't allow
myself to fail under Libby's gaze!
The Karakuri packing puzzle had won a Jury Honourable Mention award at the
2023 IPP design competition and I really had to see why. It has been created for us by Mine from
some rather beautiful woods and consists of 5 oddly shaped pieces (one of
which has a dowel sticking out) and two 2 voxel dowels. The box has a 3x3x3
cavity which is partially sealed by a 1 voxel lip and the pieces have 26
voxels plus the captive dowel would make 27. There are enough dowel shaped
holes drilled into the pieces which would allow the 2 dowels to be included
inside and also a hole for the captive one. Part of me did wonder whether the
captive dowel was just supposed to protrude into the missing voxel but this
would not be elegant and I very quickly abandoned that idea. Neither Mine-san
nor Yasuhiro-san would make/design anything inelegant.
As I explained to Libby, the first thing to do is work out how to make the
cube shape that might fit inside and then see whether the dowels would fit and
finally assemble it in the box - easy peasy she said! I proceeded to make
multiple attempts in front of her and she quickly realised that this was a
proper challenge. I pointed out that having found a few cubic assemblies, it
was possible to discount some because they required one of the pieces to be
oriented in a position which was physically impossible to insert into the box.
I quickly narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities and had to stop
someone breathing a few times which gave me a breather to think about it (pun
intended).
In the meantime, I was forced to start clearing my desk which I had not seen in months
This was from months ago and it had gotten worse
Finally after multiple moves up and down stairs, I could see where the desk had once been:
Hooray! Nearly there - soon my ears will stop bleeding.
I did find a puzzle stand without a puzzle:
I had no idea what this belonged to
The helpful guys on FB chipped in to tell me that it was from Juno's SDCB but Shane, being even more helpful said that it was to display a VERY special "Rubic cube" - please note that was his spelling and, if you know Shane, then that's pretty good for him! So I found a bunch of VERY special Rubic cubes to show the stand off properly:
The one in the stand is one of just 3 Hexaminx crystals ever produced, to the left is a Master Rex cube and the right is a Master curvy copter (both very rare and special). Behind it is Kevin’s burr designed and made for me by Jose Diaz (later produced in greater numbers by the late Eric Fuller).
My new cabinets now have a few lovely cubes inside:
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