That was not quite right

So, errr.. Among the things I was supposed to at least get started on yesterday, Thursday, is cleaning this house in Tempe to the best of my ability so it can be rented out ASAP, and maybe I’ll even get part of my deposit back. There’s more to the story, since the cleaning was actually supposed to start Wednesday, except that the moving didn’t get done until late Wednesday night and … well, at this rate I may never do a proper post about the ordeal, but… suffice it to say, I was supposed to do some cleaning yesterday. I was also extremely physically exhausted and sore from four continuous days of packing and lifting and carrying and lifting and sometimes dropping on my toes just about everything I own, so slept in and spent many hours relaxing. Then around 8PM last night I was getting ready to get started working on the kitchen, and I was going through the programs on my laptop and quitting them or telling them I would be away from the PC for a while, when I noticed that at some point I had started up Fool’s Errand. You may remember I mentioned it was an early game by the same guy who developed the contest puzzles for David Blaine’s book, which I never solved before, despite years of access to it in High School. You may also remember that I downloaded it with the intention of going through it and 3 in Three to get my mind back in the mindset of the creator… you know, so I can solve the ones that could be worth $100k easier. So as long as it was running and I hadn’t even taken one minute to look at it since downloading it, I figured I could take a look, maybe solve one or two puzzles, and go start on the kitchen in a few minutes. Keep in mind that this is a game that I spent months playing when I first discovered it and which I know Zoe has been playing off and on since I linked to it and as of three days ago was only about half-way through the thing. Keep that in mind, I mean, when I say that I just completed it moments ago.

Not that I just realized I’d been sitting here playing a Mac Classic game all night and should quit and go to bed. I just totally finished the game. In one sitting. Literally. I didn’t get up once, to eat or drink or pee or anything. I just started playing and played and played and played until I won. I didn’t even look online for help until I literally had all the puzzle clues deciphered and onto the last screen and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t triggering the ‘finale’ after I’d double-checked my solutions twice, and after carefully reading through all the explanations for the final set of clues and their solutions, I found that I had mis-spelled the very last word. I had put ‘Amythyst’ instead of ‘Amethyst’. Probably because it was 6AM and I’d been playing the game all night and am very tired. So that’s it, huh? That wasn’t so bad. The only puzzle I seemed to really have trouble with was Death’s puzzle, and only until I realized you had to cheat to beat death. Man O Man.

I did end up totally filling a little 4″ square piece of scratch paper. For some reason I had trouble doing a couple of the scrambled word-cipher puzzles in my head, and in others I just made notes until all the data for the puzzle had passed through my head and onto the paper, then didn’t look at the notes as I solved the puzzle. It’s a good way to doublecheck you’ve gone through all the evidence, I think. Three colors of ink in overlapping layers of tiny rows of cryptic symbols and jumbled letters oriented all four directions… I doubt it would be of much use after a year or two when my mind has filed away how to read it so far that it becomes easier to just make new notes.

Anyway, I’m going to sleep now. I’m looking forward to playing 3 in Three (in a week or two, after I get settles in up in Pine) again now. I believe I only played through about 2/3 of that, and I put a lot more hours into it than fool’s errand in HS. Maybe it’ll take two nights.

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Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.