Tag Archives: solution

The Puzzling Sudoku Babe

So I was hanging out at my friends house the other day, and it was raining, and their wasn’t much on TV, and my friend busts out this jigsaw puzzle. Like the one you used to do when you were kids. Maybe not. Maybe you still do them.  Like when you try to find an easy way to put the puzzle together, you start to line up the edges, so you can see what fits where, right? How easily can you imagine that, now?  The only problem was, my friend, who has a bunch of old jigsaw puzzles, something about her sister teaching some kids before or something, didn’t have any of the boxes. She just had bags and bags of puzzle pieces. And none of the bags even had any markings on them whatsoever, they were just old crumpled bags when pieces in them. We weren’t even sure if all the pieces were there. So as we continued to put things together, we started arguing over what was what. A castle! No, a gang of horses! No, no, an aquarium with tropical fish. And on an on. We were so pathetic, that we had about twenty different ideas of what it might be when we only had completed the outer edges.

It’s like when I was in third grade. We had to do some kind of math puzzle, and I had always thought I was good at math, even in the fourth grade. Maybe it had something to do with my pyramid project.  Anyways something I was even better at in 3rd grade was I was able to generate good feelings for my teacher, since I pretty much had decided that I was going to to marry her.  But we had this puzzle, and it was like one of those Sudoku puzzles, where you have to put everything in the right order. But unfortunately, the only order I was thinking about was our pizza order for our wedding night.  Boy did my mistake hit me when somebody else was able to get the puzzle right before I did. When the other kid jumped up with the answer, she beamed at him with a look that must’ve made him feel really proud. And I was still contemplating where the 9 should go.

Like when I was hiking with my friend one summer in the mountains. This huge tree had fallen in front of the trail, and when my buddy and I got there, there was this group of hikers that looked pretty inexperienced. They were looking at their map, apparantly trying to find their way around the tree. Now normally, you just climb over the tree, but this was a really really big tree. And they were looking up the hill and trying to find a way to go up and around it. And about every five minutes or so they would stop, and moan and complain about how much time they were losing. I guess they were on a tight schedule. Maybe they had an appointment with a bear who was supposed to steal their food at a certain time, I don’t know. Anyways, while they were looking up the hill, and back to their maps (which were in these really expensive looking waterproof map cases) my buddy and I decided to try something different. We made a decision, the kind of decision that you make when you are not sure how it is going to work out, but you make it anyways, just like the one’s I’m sure you’ve been able to make alot, right? So anyways, we backtracked about a hundred meters, and then traverse lower, going under the tree, and then easily come up on the other side of tree. It’s funny what happens when you focus on solutions instead of stressing over some appointment with some bear that I’m sure will be happy to steal your food even if you were a little bit late. It’s not like bears wear watches or anything.

So we finished the hike safe and sound, got a few pictures (but not of any bears), and later I decided that Sudoku just isn’t for me. I certainly don’t want to keep chasing something that I missed out on a long time ago, right?  It’s not like if I develop super skills on some obscure math problem my second grade teacher will pop back into my life and sweep me off my feet with a pizza. Besides, she’s probably like 80 years old by now.

And the funny thing is, by the time my buddy and I finished the jigsaw puzzle (which actually turned out to be a bunch of swans standing around in some park somewhere, posing for the picture no less), it had stopped raining and we were able to go out and really focus our energies on being able to enjoy the day.

Permalink