4138 Cypress Road

The answer to the Holiday Challenge was that Davis and Evi built a scale-model gingerbread house of our home.

From this angle you can see the front porch and Erin's room.

From here you can see the back porch that over looks the lake and the second story
bump out sitting area in our bedroom.
Our roof is actually that steep, but not that striped.


Congratulation to Michelle P. for the first correct guess (on Facebook).

And I just couldn't resist including this Evi-photo because she is so beautiful.

Holiday Contest

Davis and Evi got home on Tuesday just in time to crash the Jane Long Chess Club Christmas party. I wasn't quick enough with the camera to capture Aaron leaping into Davis's arms with his legs wrapped around Davis at the waist, but I do have the image etched in my brain.

I'm not sure the hours they had been keeping during finals, but I was willing to stay up with them Tuesday night for a little puzzling and post-final debriefing. I went on to bed at about 10:45, satisfied that we had assembled the border and made good progress on several other sections. This is what I woke up to on Wednesday morning (1000 pieces later):


Do you recognize Frank Lloyd Wright's Saguaro Forms & Cactus Flowers ?

Since then, it has been non-stop projects. In fact, I am typing away to silk-screening operation at the dining room table. One of the projects is the subject of today's Puzzle Challenge. Your job: guess what their project is.

Scrabble

I have not read Going Rogue. Nor will I. I did, however, read on someone else's blog that the Palin family played Scrabble, which is the second time Scrabble has popped into my field of vision lately. The first time was in a phone conversation with Davis a couple of weeks ago. He was headed to the store to buy a game that would challenge him and was looking for recommendations. I buzzed through several options which he rejected for various reasons. Then I suggested Scrabble on the theory that as a mathematician who rocked at strategy games (he is practically unstoppable at Pente, Risk, Monopoly, and any other game based on recognizing patterns) that maybe a word-based game would take away his usual edge.

That's when Davis explained to me that Scrabble really was a math game.

Do you believe that?

He went on to explain that Scrabble required a knowledge of sets and combinatorics. The basic strategy was to maximize the overlap between the various combinations of letters on your rack and then to compare the combinations with the set of words in your mental dictionary. Once you had a set of matches, you can maximize your score through the placement of tiles on the optimal available spot on the board.

Is that how you play Scrabble?

No hording of Ks and Qs, as the Palin family does?

No memorizing of obscure words that contain multiple high point tiles (for example, QUARTZY)?

No coming up with convincing definitions of fanciful words so that you can, in one fell swoop, get rid of the problematic letters or perhaps the several "i"s that always gravitate towards your tray?