The last four months have been really challenging for me, consisting mostly of battling with illness, travel, injuries, and exhaustion, alternating with frantic work to meet deadlines jeopardized by the first four items. However, I’ve slowly worked my way through all that, and at the beginning of February, I remarked to a friend that for the first time in four months, I finally felt fully recovered and ready to go to work on my business again.

Two hours after telling her that, I walked down the driveway to my car, tripped, and fell – hard – onto my left hand.

After several hours running around various medical facilities, we wound up in the emergency room at El Camino Hospital, where the doctors X-rayed my impressively swollen hand/wrist and determined there were no broken bones (thank goodness!). However, because of the swelling, they couldn’t tell how much other damage there might be. It could be anything from a bruise to a nasty sprain; there was no way to tell (short of spending $10,000 on an MRI) until the swelling went down. They sent me home with a wrist brace, and suggested making an appointment with my primary care doctor in a week or so, once my hand looked normal again. Ice, elevation, etc. in the interim.

Having a partially disabled hand, even if it isn’t your dominant hand, is unbelievably frustrating. There’s the small stuff, like needing to get shampoo and conditioner in pump dispensers, or struggling to button anything (especially jeans). Annoying but manageable. But there’s bigger stuff. Like being unable to drive, and (most infuriatingly) being reduced to typing with one hand. Particularly if you normally type 90+ words per minute, and almost everything you do or say requires typing. It’s like trying to download a large image file over an ancient 300 baud modem – technically you can do it, but the process is so slow, painful, and never-ending that it makes you want to shoot yourself.

The good news is that things are improving – while the swelling isn’t entirely gone, some of the knuckles are visible again, and I can touch my palm with the tips of my fingers, though I can’t form a fully closed fist yet. I can drive again, and I am (gingerly) starting to venture into the exciting land of two-handed typing! So I am making progress. I’m going to see a doctor sometime next week to get it evaluated. Given how swollen and painful it was right after the accident, I’m pretty sure I sprained something, and there’s enough residual pain that I want to get it evaluated. Hands are too critical to leave to chance.

Since I haven’t been able to do any of the things I should be doing, I’ve been doing the next best thing and embracing frivolity. (If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.) So I have put in quite a few hours on the puzzle, and am now making amazingly fast progress, mostly because my color sensitivity has improved drastically while working on the puzzle.

Here’s where I was 2.5 hours into assembling the puzzle.  

At this point I could only vaguely identify where each piece belonged, maybe within a 4-5 piece radius. Adjacent pieces looked nearly the same color, so I had to try each piece in a lot of places. Worse, a lot of the pieces were ambiguous in their fit, so even if a piece looked like it fit, it might actually belong two or three pieces away. And on top of that, because the pieces are completely featureless except for the color, there was no way to check whether a piece was where it belonged. So I would pick up a piece, try it in a dozen places, put it where it looked like it fit, only to find out, after putting ten more pieces together, that it didn’t belong there at all. Assembly was fiendishly difficult.

Five hours into assembly, I was moving a lot faster than at first:

But it still took a total of 11 hours to go from this:

to this:

However, the next tray went a LOT faster. Twice as fast, in fact. Here’s the red and orange tray at the start.

About two and a half hours later, I was about 2/3 done with the tray:

This morning, I went on a rampage, and spent 4.25 hours working on the puzzle. I finished off the red/orange tray and emptied the entire yellow/yellow-green tray:

There are 2.5 trays still left to assemble – blues, purples, and blue-greens mostly, plus a few rows of pieces on the top and bottom of the puzzle, and the edge pieces. I’m deliberately assembling this puzzle from the center out. That’s because the puzzle is almost exactly the size of the table, so having pieces around the outer edges (assembled or not) means they’ll almost inevitably get knocked off onto the floor, to be snapped up at once by the lurking puzzle gods.

“And how are things going with the puzzle gods?” I hear you ask. Well, they’re happy and healthy, though they find their human slave’s temporary disability exceedingly annoying. Fritz, in particular, has been suffering because I was unable to give him a  proper belly rub for almost a week!!! Scandalous. A proper belly rub requires two hands: one to scritch his head and the other to rub his belly. With the injured left hand, I wasn’t able to scritch his head properly. The first day, I tried giving him a one-handed belly rub. (Totally unacceptable!) On the second day, I figured out that I could use the thumb and forefinger of my left hand to give him a two-finger head scritch. Half a head scritch is better than none, but a day or two ago I was able to give him a proper belly rub again. (And there was much rejoicing.)

So Fritz was able to start doing yoga again:

Tigress wasn’t especially disturbed by my injury, though she did accost me as soon as I returned from the ER to inform me that I had missed her daily play session, that my unapproved absenteeism was totally unacceptable, and she was going to dock my salary for the missed time. I pointed out that, while she was totally right about my being the world’s worst human, and that no cat should ever have to put up with a human as awful as me, docking my salary would only matter if I actually got paid for catering to her whims. 🙂 She muttered something about humans, bad attitudes, and selling me downriver to work on a catnip plantation, but finally settled for insisting that I play with her RIGHT NOW. Fortunately it only takes one hand to play with the mousie toy (a little mouse-shaped toy on a string attached to the rod), so the queen and mistress of the household was soon convinced to forgive me.

Which is good, because a grumpy Tigress looks like this:

Definitely not the first thing you want to see in the morning!

Puzzle-wise, the Strategic Puzzle Defense System (aka a sheet of plastic dropcloth pulled over the table at the end of each session) seems to be working fairly well, at least when I’m not there. However, most security systems fail not due to brute force attacks, but are compromised internally, via Trojan Horse attacks or other forms of infiltration. For example, I caught one puzzle god posing as a tourist, sniffing oh-so-innocently at some terrified puzzle pieces:

Despite her protests of innocence, security escorted her from the controlled area – five times in rapid succession. (She is a very persistent spy.)

And then the other puzzle god showed up, seductively purring, “I’m just an adorable, beautiful cat who wants to keep you company! I have no interest in your puzzle pieces, I just want to tell you what an awesome human you are!” And I’m a real sucker for cats with beautiful soft fur and gorgeous eyes, so I let him stick around for awhile:

So the Strategic Puzzle Defense system works just fine, but since humans are supremely gullible where cats are concerned, the puzzle gods may well win in the end. (Because cats, as we all know, are way smarter than humans. Or so my cats tell me…)

Puzzle gods vs. human: the titanic battle rages on…

13.5 hours of sorting later, all 5000 pieces are neatly arranged by color:

The plastic box contains all the edge pieces, and all the rest of the pieces are sorted more or less by color (hue/value).

Now come the difficult strategic decisions. Those living in the mortal world would naturally start by putting together the edge pieces, then adding pieces, building towards the center. It’s the traditional method, and also the most efficient approach for most puzzles.

However, I do not live in the mortal world, but a world dominated by two puzzle gods, whose mighty powers no mere mortal can withstand. Their razor-sharp claws, lightning paws, and fearsome fangs are devoted to one pursuit and one pursuit only: stealing puzzle pieces from the puny humans and making them disappear. (They’re also pretty darn cute, which is why they get away with it. 😉 )

So before moving on, I needed to design and create the Strategic Puzzle Defense System. This is the sort of project that obviously needs expert technical help, and some of my Caltech friends were happy to oblige. My friend Karen started simply, by recommending a puzzle mat. These are large pieces of fairly stiff, slightly sticky cloth (usually felt), on which one assembles the puzzle. At the end of each session, you roll the puzzle mat around a tube, with the pieces still inside. The slight “tooth” of the felt keeps the puzzle from disintegrating, and the tube keeps everything stable.

There was only one problem: at at 30″ x 80″, the puzzle was almost 20″ too long to fit, even on the largest commercial puzzle mat I could find.

“Yoga mat?” asked Karen.

“Still too small,” I said.

“Two yoga mats and a lot of duct tape?”

“Uh….”

At this point, Scott (Karen’s partner and another Caltech alum) popped in with another modest suggestion: Mount a large piece of plywood to the ceiling, then lift and lower it out of feline reach using paracord and pulleys. He was even helpful enough to point me at directions for creating my own plywood-and-paracord table on Instructables.

While mounting an entire 4’x8′ sheet of plywood to the dining room ceiling and rigging up a pulley system to lift and lower it would have been an awesome (and elegant – er, sorta) way to protect the puzzle, there would have been a few downsides, such as the inevitable destruction of the dining room chandelier. Also, since one of our mighty puzzle gods loves climbing into high places, unless the plywood were pulled right up against the ceiling, she could probably still get in.

(It has since been pointed out to me that a more efficient approach – at least in terms of materials – would be to skip the plywood and simply mount the pulleys, etc. directly to the dining room table, drawing it up to the ceiling when not in use. Because having a 100-pound object hanging from the ceiling in a high-traffic area (right next to the back door) is a Really Good Idea. What could go wrong?!?)

After reluctantly dismissing the Great Puzzle Elevator approach, I went back to the puzzle mat idea. It seemed like it could work, and of course the most obvious way to solve the size problem would be to make my own. So I went online, read up about making your own puzzle mat, and then went off to the craft store in search of the materials.

Now, as anyone who knows a theoretical scientist will tell you, with enough inspiration and dogged persistence, an inventive person can make any task arbitrarily complicated. (Theoretical scientists will tell you that their job is actually to simplify our understanding of things, but – having grown up in a community of them – I’m occasionally a bit, um, skeptical. 😉 ) So there I was, in Jo-Ann Fabrics, with the simple task of going in and buying 3 yards of felt. Given that the store was nearly empty, this should have taken at most five minutes.

It wound up taking nearly forty-five minutes. I grappled with difficult design decisions, missing information, and my natural thirst for advancing human knowledge. Fleece fabric was on sale, and also has a slightly sticky surface. Could it be even better than felt? And what kind of felt would be best – wool-rayon, polyester, or “craft felt”? Would the puzzle pieces stick to the back of the felt if I used unlined felt? If I lined it, would the lining come out better if I just sewed it at the edges, or should I quilt it down? Would fusible web be better for attaching the lining to the felt? There were three kinds of fusible web -which kind would be best?

Being the daughter of two scientists, my natural response to these sorts of situations is usually “Buy/make one of every possible option, test them all, write up the results, and publish it.” This would have been great for every other human craving to know how to make the most devastatingly effective 30″ x 80″ puzzle mat possible. But probably not the wisest use of 100 hours, especially since I have finished exactly one puzzle in the last two decades and have probably only a 50% chance of finishing even one more puzzle in the next two decades. So – after forty-five minutes of hand-wringing and materials analysis, I throttled back my scientific instincts, bought the felt and some fusible web, and went home.

Once I got home, of course, I realized that I’d made the classic engineer’s mistake: Designing a product without thinking about how I was going to use it. The table was almost exactly the size of the puzzle, so rolling and unrolling the puzzle mat would very likely send some puzzle pieces sliding off the edges, particularly if I had started around the edges of the puzzle, as traditional. I could start assembling the puzzle in the middle, but the friction of the felt might make it hard to move the puzzle around if I needed more space on either edge. I thought up some other possible workarounds, but eventually concluded that it would be hard to make the puzzle mat work.

So – having exhausted all the complicated options – I’m returning to the simplest one: put the puzzle together on the table, and cover it with a dropcloth at the end of each session. I’ll start in the middle, where the colors are easy to differentiate, and work my way out to the border pieces, so they’re not dangling off the edges of the table the entire time. Simple, and probably quite effective.

I am ruefully reminded of my favorite quote by Immanuel Kant, which I first saw (very appropriately) scrawled as graffiti in one of the student Houses at Caltech:

Here as elsewhere human reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way.

Of course, I’m sure that the cats’ reaction to the puzzle, now that I’ve put so much time and thought into protecting it from them, will probably be this:

Happy holidays from me, Mike, and the cats! Wishing you a joyful and peaceful year to come.

Continuing health problems (fortunately, more annoying than serious) have left me pretty fuzzy for the past week, so I haven’t been able to do much in the way of creative work. Which has fortunately given me time to work on my latest frivolous challenge: 5000 Colours!

This puzzle is exactly the same as the 1000 Colours jigsaw puzzle from my last blog post, only much, much larger and with more pieces. To accommodate the huge puzzle, I had to dig out the extensions that came with our dining room table ten years ago and haven’t ever used. And instead of 1,000 pieces, of course, it has 5,000.

Since I would like to put together a 5,000-piece puzzle rather than a 4,997 piece puzzle, and I expect this puzzle to take weeks to finish, I have given some thought to foiling the two beautiful, wonderful, and wickedly mischievous puzzle gods who share the house with Mike and me. Leaving all 5000 pieces on the table while sorting them by color would of course result in delighted cats and missing pieces. So I decided to start by sorting the colors on the giant sheet pans that I use during chocolate season. Here’s what my system looked like at the outset:

Each sheet pan gets a different hue, shaded from dark near the bottom to light at the top. One sheet pan holds all the unsorted pieces, and gets stored in the baker’s cart which sits in a corner of the dining room, out of feline reach. One plastic container contains edge pieces (for later use), and the other contains unsorted puzzle pieces (it’s easier to use the plastic container than to work with the tray directly).

Of course, I couldn’t just leave the trays out,, lest my beloved puzzle gods steal pieces or knock the trays off the table, gleefully catapulting pieces everywhere. So I have, terribly unsportingly, taken up the habit of stacking the trays at the end of every session, and putting an empty tray on top:

So far things seem to have gone well, though of course, like the afikomen at Passover, one doesn’t find out until the very end whether the kids managed to steal a piece when you weren’t looking. 

Sorting the puzzle pieces by color, while necessary (I think), is going slowly. Here’s what things looked like after five hours of sorting:

And here’s where I am now, 11.5 hours after starting:

As you can see, I’m almost done (the right-hand plastic container holds the few unsorted pieces remaining). The placement isn’t exact, but I’ve tried to get each piece within 3 inches of where it “belongs”. I figure that’s good enough for now; as I put together each section, I can sort the pieces more precisely.

I’m enjoying the sorting process immensely. Not only is it fun to pick up pieces and move them around in the color range to see where they belong, but I’m developing a much better eye for color. The biggest challenge in sorting out the pieces is placing the very light and very dark colors, since the hues are only weakly visible at the ends of the value spectrum. So I wind up picking up a lot of nearly-white pieces and trying to guess what “color” (hue) it really is.

Fortunately, while it isn’t easy to figure this out by looking at the pieces by themselves, comparing it to already-sorted pieces usually reveals the answer. The eye may not be great at determining hues in the abstract, but it is very good at saying “this color is bluer than the one next to it”. I take my best guess, move the piece around until I find the spot where it fits, and note whether I got it right. I’m getting much better at guessing the location correctly – so my eye for color must be improving.

Soon, of course, it will be time for Part II of my evil plan to foil the puzzle gods. I haven’t quite figured out how to protect the half-assembled puzzle from the cats yet. One option would be to put a plastic drop-cloth over the puzzle when not working on it, and set some weights on it so nobody can pull the drop-cloth off the table. (Tigress loves yanking off tablecloths, and doesn’t seem at all concerned about small objects flinging themselves wildly across the room as she does so. If she weren’t the most perfect and wonderful cat in the world, she’d have been sold to the circus years ago.)

Another option would be to do most of the assembly on the trays, and only transfer finished sections to the table for storage. This seems like a better idea, but I haven’t yet figured out how to transfer the finished sections. I’ve lined the trays with large sheets of parchment paper (also left over from chocolate season), but I’m not sure whether this will work effectively for transferring finished sections. Clearly, experiments will be needed.

I am undoubtedly accumulating terribly cat karma by refusing to share my toys with Fritz and Tigress, but so it goes. I am certain I will pay for this later…

However, in an attempt at redeeming myself, I did spend some time this year trying to persuade Mike that we needed a Christmas tree. I told him, “I just realized we’re being awful cat parents! Fritz and Tigress are over four years old now, and they’ve never gotten a chance to do all the Christmas cat things! They’ve never had an opportunity to climb a Christmas tree and knock it over. They’ve never gotten to chew up the wiring for Christmas lights. And they’ve never had a chance to bat at, and destroy, all the beautiful shiny cat toys that humans hang on the branches. They’re leading a terribly deprived life, and if we don’t get them a tree this year, I’m certain we’ll hear about it from their therapists later.”

Mike, however, was strangely unmoved by my impassioned plea. Nor was he excited about my suggestion that, after the season was over, we could take the dried-out tree into the backyard and set it on fire. “But they go up like huge napalm torches as soon as you light them! It’s really cool! What could go wrong?!?”

(I feel for Mike sometimes. It must be hard to be the only adult in the house. 🙂 )

Lest you feel that Fritz and Tigress live a deprived life, however, here is a photo of Fritz getting his daily belly-rub:

And here is Tigress, looking as innocent as possible for a cat with a mouthful of feathers:

We’re going away for the holidays this year, but we’ve got the best cat-sitter ever. She loves cats, and sends us photos and video of her playing with the kitties every day that we’re away. (Judging from the videos, they have more fun with her than they do with us!) She also knows what toys cats go nuts over, and which pet stores sell the freshest catnip. She adores both Fritz and Tigress, and always remembers their names.

Of course, our cat-sitter is also super popular (which is why I haven’t told you her name 😉 ), and she books up very quickly, especially right around the holidays. So this year Mike and I made our travel plans about a month early to make sure we could get onto her calendar. We may be awful humans for running away from our cat-slave duties over the holidays (and for not letting them burn down the house while destroying “their” Christmas tree), but at least Fritz and Tigress will get the very best in substitute servants while we’re away.

Despite the health issues, I’m hoping to make more progress on my color class while I’m away. The feedback I’ve gotten has been that it’s too abstract, so I’m trying to add some more practical elements. Stay tuned for more on that…