(no subject)
Part 1 | Part 2
Monday
Poked half hardheartedly at A STREETCAR NAMED... for a little while. This puzzle featured a string of old fashioned street cars that had been cut into pieces and reassembled. As I recognized them instantly as San Francisco street cars (currently in service) maybe there was something that could be done with it. (After all nobody else on the team had recognized them - maybe this meant that I was starting at least a little bit ahead of the casual solver.)
Managed to find the website that the original artwork had come from quite quickly and with sauergeek to help I opened up a spreadsheet and we started dissecting each trolley.
Augh, another long slow slog was really not what I had in mind (I'm not really the research type on the best of days). Indeed, after a few minutes of poking at it, I called a stop. What did we think we were going to do with this information once we spent a hour and a half acquiring it? We had a bunch of disassembled street cars cut into random lengths and reassembled. Manic Sages had already proven themselves to be a little bit over the top with regard to what they required of their puzzle solvers, there was no way that this was going to be cut and dry and looking at the sheer number of puzzles into which we had already invested hours of work without any pay off, was it really worth all the effort of gathering the data?
NO.
I'd poked at PAINT BY SYMBOLS earlier in the day, but had been unable to rope anyone else in to work on it with me and it was exactly the kind of puzzle that I needed to talk through with another person.
Of course that left me without any good ideas as to what to do next. jagheterlelle suggested that a shower might make me feel better (or least more alert) and while I didn’t actually believe her, it seemed like as good an idea as any so took myself off to do just that.
She was right, showers really are invigorating and midway through I came full circle and fixated once again on PORTALS. While all the other puzzle options seemed to involve words, PORTALS was everything I loved most in the world. Clearly I should just print out another copy and start from scratch, with the way this hunt was going I should have more than enough time to finish it before the coin was found.
Marched back up to the room with renewed determination and surreptitiously printed myself a new copy of the puzzle. After all while I might think that PORTALS was the best use of my time, my teammates had seen the quivering wreck it transformed me into. There was no way they were going to sit passively by and just let me work on it.
Buried myself in the far corner of the room, wrapped my (stylish) dragon blanket around me and got to work. I managed about 15 minutes before jagheterlelle intervened. She was working on SNAKE and having great success, indeed it seemed too easy.
Intrigued I let her distract me from PORTALS. The SNAKE grid featured two different types of letters on its grid and jagheterlelle had determined that you could create a “snake” that traveled through each of the letters necessary to form the answer words from the round. Along the way the “snake” would encounter (and according to the flavor text “eat”) several of the small round letters. It seemed likely that the round letters would spell out our final solution.
As this seemed perfectly logical, I grabbed a blank grid from the pile and set about plotting out one of the answer words. Of course I chose the longest one so jagheterlelle plotted two in the time it took me to do one. Was I slipping? I used to be good at these.
No, rather jagheterlelle didn’t know all of the rules and had plotted them incorrectly. This was actually a good thing as she seemed certain that had she been doing them “correctly” they would have proven too hard and she would have abandoned the attempt.
See, we make a good team and before we knew it we had a clue phrase and the answer! We’d solved one of the mini-metas.
We were only missing one solution in this round and as we knew what letters it had to contain (and what order the “snake” had to “eat” them in) I spent a bit of time trying to see if I could come up with any viable options for a back-solve. There were a few possibilities but as none of them were anything I particularly liked I quickly allowed myself to be distracted by other things.
Turned our attention to the other two mini-metas. My teammates were quite convinced that SNAKES AND LADDERS was a word ladder, but nobody really sure how to start it.
For some reason we felt that OUROBOROS was the more manageable of the two and so we turned our attention to it. The flavor text (which read "Ugh, more snakes? I'm not cut out for this.") was not the most helpful. While it seemed obvious to me that we should cut it out, many of my teammates felt just as strongly that we shouldn’t. As I had apparently reached a point where I was sick and tired of putting in hours of grunt labor only to discover I’d been doing it completely wrong, I didn’t care what the flavor text said, I was quite unwilling to take the time to cut them out without some idea of what we might get if went through all of the trouble.
It certainly didn’t look like anything. Played around with it in photoshop for awhile in hopes that we might get something out of a simple rotation but nothing seemed to work.
Went back to staring at the letters. We’d managed to acquire all of the solution words in that round so opted for the simple expedient of crossing out each letter from the solution words as we used them.
While this mostly ignored the problem of the partially obscured half letters, it did leave us with a pile of letters that could be reasonably anagrammed to “disjointed” . Alas this was not the correct answer so we poked harder and made up several arbitrary rules for dealing with the half letters.
At one point rccap left the room to use the bathroom and as this is usually when we solve these things, I was really excited to suddenly see the phrase “JOIN OR DIE” within the mess. As this directly references the revolutionary war era flag (featuring a cut up snake) this HAD to be it. Called it in and were devastated to learn that this wasn’t the answer either.
At this point I decided I’d had enough. Told rccap to wake me if the room started to thin out and he needed more people on duty and went to bed.
Awoken a mere two hours later. “You did tell me to wake you,” he explained sheepishly. (Yes, but I didn’t mean it!)
While our Seattle crew had packed up and called it a day (they did after all have flights to catch), people were still hard at work all clustered around several piles of cut up snake bits. Apparently Game Control had sent out a hint to everyone specifically telling us to cut up the snakes and using our answer words, to reassemble them into the outlines of the states featured on the flag.
“Augh.”
sallythetimid and jagheterlelle were hard at work on this but I had had enough. Why wasn’t “JOIN OR DIE” a good enough solution on it’s own? Why was it necessary to do this new completely arbitrary and time wasting step? (Interestingly enough, according to the solution page, we weren’t intended to have gotten “JOIN OR DIE” without having first assembled the states and then the only purpose of the clue phrase was to clue us to refer to the flag for an ordering (by state) such that we could index into each of the answer words. Next time let’s just stick with “JOIN OR DIE”.
Not a lot I really wanted to accomplish so puttered around and started to clean up while my team continued working. While there was a slightly manic tone (it was a Manic (Sages) Monday after all) to their voices, my teammates still seemed to be having fun if only because best_ken_ever was busy reading aloud all the snarky comments that were beginning to appear on twitter. Apparently we weren’t the only ones beginning to fear that this hunt might never end.
“This is the hunt that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friends, somebody started solving it not knowing what it was and they'll keep solving forever and ever just because....”
Indeed even the website http://isithuntyet.info/ was getting in on the action. Instead of their usual “yes” or “no”, the site said “STILL”.
As hunt HQ had at some point sent out an e-mail saying that you only needed 5 team members (metas) instead of the usual 6 in order to make an attempt on the bank (runaround), the snark was probably deserved.
More importantly, the snark was hilarious and it turned what might otherwise have been a pretty discouraging morning into an entertaining one.
I think this picture sums it up better than I ever could.
While we were down to a mere eight people, my teammates seemed content to keep working. Personally my brain was fried. Fortunately there were non-puzzle tasks that needed to be done. As Kyle seemed to be in about the same condition the two of us tidied up the space and began doing some basic cleaning as we waited for someone to FIND THE DAMN COIN!
It’s funny, because as someone who waits all year for this one weekend of puzzly goodness, I secretly kind of liked that it stretched into the wee hours of Monday morning. It was really only when we reached the not so wee hours and it still didn’t look like it was going to end anytime soon, that I hit a wall. Clearly had I had any idea that hunt would go on for this long I would have slept more, as it was I had had a grand total of 11 hours of sleep since 6:30am on Friday morning and I didn’t know how much more I had left in me.
It felt like I was running a marathon only to reach the 26 mile mark and find that the finish line had been moved. While smart people would have stopped (and indeed did) when they finished the 26 miles, we foolish types kept right on trucking, we’d come so far, we couldn’t let a silly little thing like a moving finish line deter us now.
In preparation for returning the tables to the other room I deflated my air mattress, a process that basically involved opening the valve and laying down on top of it. A process that Kyle was quick to compare to Ken’s sleeping experience, as apparently his air mattress had had a slow leak all weekend leaving one able to sleep for approximately 4 hours before being rudely awoken by the hard floor. I don’t know exactly what it was that Kyle said or how he said it but somehow he broke me and I laid on my deflated air mattress for a good five minutes laughing so hysterically that tears were streaming down my face. Apparently it was audible to IIF all the way down the hall.
When I had regained my sanity, I discovered that rccap had managed to find a co-worker to let him into the LNS lounge and had returned with the last of the food. While it wasn’t much we did have some leftover pasta salad ingredients (not the pasta, that was still locked away in my car) and a few wraps. The upshot of this was one last sandwich making endeavor. Tomato, mozzarella and basil wraps and when the wraps ran out, tomato and mozzarella wrapped in basil leaves, oh how unprepared I was for this to last an extra day.
Wandered around for a bit when the food was gone. Plaid Thong on one side of us had long ago packed up and gone home (Saturday night?) but IIF was still hard at work though they looked a little bit shell shocked as evidenced by the contingent of them that had taken up spots on the floor in the hallway.
As I was in about the same state, struck up a conversation. My team and I had been planning on handing out teaser cards at wrapup for WARTRON:BOSTON but as a number of IIF memebers didn’t expect to make it to wrap up, ended up handing them out a bit early.
Indeed, there was apparently an evening snowstorm on the way so if I was smart I should probably consider trying to hand out teaser cards now. Good plan!
Grabbed a handful of cards and started wandering the hallways, surprisingly easy to identify mystery hunters (by the dazed look in their eyes and general sleepless appearance) though I did occasionally guess wrong. Explained WARTRON:BOSTON (or at least attempted to, I wasn’t exactly fully functional at that point) to the various people I encountered and begged them to tell their teammates about it. (We need at least 60 people in order to run this game and while I’d like to think we’ll be able to get that many, I’m terrified that we won’t and I really, really want to run this Game! As a side note, a number of our teammates who had come in from Seattle had actually played WARTRON in Portland last summer and it was really fun to pick their brains about the experience. It was also really amusing to hear a few of their stories and think, “Oh hey, I’ve heard this story from the OTHER side! There was one thing in particular that Mark, jagheterlelle and I were in fits of laughter about.)
But I digress.
Did quite the loop around campus and I can only hope that the people I talked to spread the world. Did I mention that we REALLY want to run this Game?
Back at HQ, my teammates were starting to get annoyed by the unwillingness of the little snake pieces to form recognizable shapes so I think we were all a little bit relieved when word came in at just before noon that a team (whose name was the entire text of “Atlas Shrugged” thanks to the lack of character limits on the hunt sign up form) had won. Interestingly enough they hadn’t yet found the coin, rather they had finally entered the runaround but were significantly far enough ahead of all other teams that Manic Sages felt comfortable calling it.
It would be another 3 hours before they actually managed to “find” the coin.
Aftermath
I’ve noticed in the last few years that when hunt finally comes to a close and my body starts to shut down that my ability to verbalize seems to go first. Indeed while I can communicate in writing (and have no trouble whatsoever swearing up a storm), I seem to devolve into two word sentences where each word is separated by several seconds (and a lot of laughing) as I try vainly to come up with the words needed to string together a simple thought. My teammates find it hilarious and while it’s extremely frustrating at the time I have to say I agree with their assessment. Even better are the times when I reach for the words and my mouth delivers something else entirely. I swear to god at one point I turned to jagheterlelle and said “I need pie.” To which she patted me on the arm and assured me (much as one would a slightly confused child), “we’ll get you some pie”.
“No.... No.... Not pie,” but whatever it was that I actually wanted (which was something to do with cleaning up the room), I never was able to find the words to express it.
Took one final team picture and then started cleaning up.
Wrap-up was scheduled for 3pm, and now that it was over we turned our attention to clean up. Sent rccap out to find my car and was quite pleased (and secretly relieved) when he returned successful.
Loaded up, washed down the tables, swept the floor (Kyle’s earlier sweeping job was declared inadequate by sallythetimid) and found ourselves with about an hour to kill before wrapup. Alas without rccap’s ID card the LNS couches were an unattainable dream so no naptime for us.
Headed down to 26-100 with about half an hour to go before wrap-up and proceeded to pass out WARTRON:BOSTON teaser cards to everyone walking in. I’m not particularly good at that kind of salesmanship and coupled with my current lack of verbal skills, I’m surprised I managed as well as I did. Perhaps people were merely taking pity on the blubbering imbecil that held the door for them.
Wrap-up was fun and then we wandered off to eat free cookies. Oh chocolate, where have you been for the last 24+ hours?
I’d driven around the block earlier in the day (to move my car to longer term parking once we’d finished loading it) and in the process had nearly gotten in three accidents. As this seemed like a pretty poor record for a single city block, quite clear that I was not up to driving home. As such arranged with rccap to take a (5 hours) nap at his house before heading north.
Made it home with minutes to spare before midnight and went directly to bed. I was mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted. Still only barely functional when the alarm went off at 6:30am and I proceeded to spend the day in a haze of confusion and exhaustion. My verbal processing skills still weren’t up to speed and I spent an awful lot of time grasping frantically at words each and every time a student asked me a question. (I also, may, just possibly, have snuck home for a 45 minutes nap during my free period.) Wow, note to self, a post-hunt recovery day is VERY important as evidenced by the fact that I spent every free moment sleeping for the rest of the week and well into the weekend. Indeed my daily schedule for the entirety of the week consisted of the following: Go to work, come home, take a five hour nap on the couch, eat dinner, go to bed. The upside is that my words eventually returned (albeit slowly over the course of the week) though I still haven’t bothered unpacking and putting away the team supplies. They can hang out in my living room a little bit longer!
All told we solved 76 puzzles (51 of which were legitimate solves, the rest were “optioned”).
It was exciting to see the results when Manic Sages posted the team progress graph. More so as apparently we managed to finish in 12th place! Pretty impressive for a small team of people who still consider themselves fairly new to the world of puzzle hunting.
As always I had a fabulous weekend and am so very, very grateful to Manic Sages for putting in the time and effort necessary to produce this event. Actually, let me just take a moment and elaborate on that. I had a really, really good time at hunt (and so did my team). Manic Sages obviously put a lot of time and effort into this hunt and I'd like them to know that their work was appreciated. (Also, I really loved some of the tiny little details (particularly with regard to the thematic elements), clearly there was someone who really cared paying attention to the small things and they should know that it was noticed and appreciated.)
P.S. Contrary to so many other write-ups that I've read, I actually found this year's hunt significantly less demoralizing than last year's!
Let’s do it all again next year shall we?
Part 1
Monday
Poked half hardheartedly at A STREETCAR NAMED... for a little while. This puzzle featured a string of old fashioned street cars that had been cut into pieces and reassembled. As I recognized them instantly as San Francisco street cars (currently in service) maybe there was something that could be done with it. (After all nobody else on the team had recognized them - maybe this meant that I was starting at least a little bit ahead of the casual solver.)
Managed to find the website that the original artwork had come from quite quickly and with sauergeek to help I opened up a spreadsheet and we started dissecting each trolley.
Augh, another long slow slog was really not what I had in mind (I'm not really the research type on the best of days). Indeed, after a few minutes of poking at it, I called a stop. What did we think we were going to do with this information once we spent a hour and a half acquiring it? We had a bunch of disassembled street cars cut into random lengths and reassembled. Manic Sages had already proven themselves to be a little bit over the top with regard to what they required of their puzzle solvers, there was no way that this was going to be cut and dry and looking at the sheer number of puzzles into which we had already invested hours of work without any pay off, was it really worth all the effort of gathering the data?
NO.
I'd poked at PAINT BY SYMBOLS earlier in the day, but had been unable to rope anyone else in to work on it with me and it was exactly the kind of puzzle that I needed to talk through with another person.
Of course that left me without any good ideas as to what to do next. jagheterlelle suggested that a shower might make me feel better (or least more alert) and while I didn’t actually believe her, it seemed like as good an idea as any so took myself off to do just that.
She was right, showers really are invigorating and midway through I came full circle and fixated once again on PORTALS. While all the other puzzle options seemed to involve words, PORTALS was everything I loved most in the world. Clearly I should just print out another copy and start from scratch, with the way this hunt was going I should have more than enough time to finish it before the coin was found.
Marched back up to the room with renewed determination and surreptitiously printed myself a new copy of the puzzle. After all while I might think that PORTALS was the best use of my time, my teammates had seen the quivering wreck it transformed me into. There was no way they were going to sit passively by and just let me work on it.
Buried myself in the far corner of the room, wrapped my (stylish) dragon blanket around me and got to work. I managed about 15 minutes before jagheterlelle intervened. She was working on SNAKE and having great success, indeed it seemed too easy.
Intrigued I let her distract me from PORTALS. The SNAKE grid featured two different types of letters on its grid and jagheterlelle had determined that you could create a “snake” that traveled through each of the letters necessary to form the answer words from the round. Along the way the “snake” would encounter (and according to the flavor text “eat”) several of the small round letters. It seemed likely that the round letters would spell out our final solution.
As this seemed perfectly logical, I grabbed a blank grid from the pile and set about plotting out one of the answer words. Of course I chose the longest one so jagheterlelle plotted two in the time it took me to do one. Was I slipping? I used to be good at these.
No, rather jagheterlelle didn’t know all of the rules and had plotted them incorrectly. This was actually a good thing as she seemed certain that had she been doing them “correctly” they would have proven too hard and she would have abandoned the attempt.
See, we make a good team and before we knew it we had a clue phrase and the answer! We’d solved one of the mini-metas.
We were only missing one solution in this round and as we knew what letters it had to contain (and what order the “snake” had to “eat” them in) I spent a bit of time trying to see if I could come up with any viable options for a back-solve. There were a few possibilities but as none of them were anything I particularly liked I quickly allowed myself to be distracted by other things.
Turned our attention to the other two mini-metas. My teammates were quite convinced that SNAKES AND LADDERS was a word ladder, but nobody really sure how to start it.
For some reason we felt that OUROBOROS was the more manageable of the two and so we turned our attention to it. The flavor text (which read "Ugh, more snakes? I'm not cut out for this.") was not the most helpful. While it seemed obvious to me that we should cut it out, many of my teammates felt just as strongly that we shouldn’t. As I had apparently reached a point where I was sick and tired of putting in hours of grunt labor only to discover I’d been doing it completely wrong, I didn’t care what the flavor text said, I was quite unwilling to take the time to cut them out without some idea of what we might get if went through all of the trouble.
It certainly didn’t look like anything. Played around with it in photoshop for awhile in hopes that we might get something out of a simple rotation but nothing seemed to work.
Went back to staring at the letters. We’d managed to acquire all of the solution words in that round so opted for the simple expedient of crossing out each letter from the solution words as we used them.
While this mostly ignored the problem of the partially obscured half letters, it did leave us with a pile of letters that could be reasonably anagrammed to “disjointed” . Alas this was not the correct answer so we poked harder and made up several arbitrary rules for dealing with the half letters.
At one point rccap left the room to use the bathroom and as this is usually when we solve these things, I was really excited to suddenly see the phrase “JOIN OR DIE” within the mess. As this directly references the revolutionary war era flag (featuring a cut up snake) this HAD to be it. Called it in and were devastated to learn that this wasn’t the answer either.
At this point I decided I’d had enough. Told rccap to wake me if the room started to thin out and he needed more people on duty and went to bed.
Awoken a mere two hours later. “You did tell me to wake you,” he explained sheepishly. (Yes, but I didn’t mean it!)
While our Seattle crew had packed up and called it a day (they did after all have flights to catch), people were still hard at work all clustered around several piles of cut up snake bits. Apparently Game Control had sent out a hint to everyone specifically telling us to cut up the snakes and using our answer words, to reassemble them into the outlines of the states featured on the flag.
“Augh.”
sallythetimid and jagheterlelle were hard at work on this but I had had enough. Why wasn’t “JOIN OR DIE” a good enough solution on it’s own? Why was it necessary to do this new completely arbitrary and time wasting step? (Interestingly enough, according to the solution page, we weren’t intended to have gotten “JOIN OR DIE” without having first assembled the states and then the only purpose of the clue phrase was to clue us to refer to the flag for an ordering (by state) such that we could index into each of the answer words. Next time let’s just stick with “JOIN OR DIE”.
Not a lot I really wanted to accomplish so puttered around and started to clean up while my team continued working. While there was a slightly manic tone (it was a Manic (Sages) Monday after all) to their voices, my teammates still seemed to be having fun if only because best_ken_ever was busy reading aloud all the snarky comments that were beginning to appear on twitter. Apparently we weren’t the only ones beginning to fear that this hunt might never end.
“This is the hunt that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friends, somebody started solving it not knowing what it was and they'll keep solving forever and ever just because....”
Indeed even the website http://isithuntyet.info/ was getting in on the action. Instead of their usual “yes” or “no”, the site said “STILL”.
As hunt HQ had at some point sent out an e-mail saying that you only needed 5 team members (metas) instead of the usual 6 in order to make an attempt on the bank (runaround), the snark was probably deserved.
More importantly, the snark was hilarious and it turned what might otherwise have been a pretty discouraging morning into an entertaining one.
I think this picture sums it up better than I ever could.
While we were down to a mere eight people, my teammates seemed content to keep working. Personally my brain was fried. Fortunately there were non-puzzle tasks that needed to be done. As Kyle seemed to be in about the same condition the two of us tidied up the space and began doing some basic cleaning as we waited for someone to FIND THE DAMN COIN!
It’s funny, because as someone who waits all year for this one weekend of puzzly goodness, I secretly kind of liked that it stretched into the wee hours of Monday morning. It was really only when we reached the not so wee hours and it still didn’t look like it was going to end anytime soon, that I hit a wall. Clearly had I had any idea that hunt would go on for this long I would have slept more, as it was I had had a grand total of 11 hours of sleep since 6:30am on Friday morning and I didn’t know how much more I had left in me.
It felt like I was running a marathon only to reach the 26 mile mark and find that the finish line had been moved. While smart people would have stopped (and indeed did) when they finished the 26 miles, we foolish types kept right on trucking, we’d come so far, we couldn’t let a silly little thing like a moving finish line deter us now.
In preparation for returning the tables to the other room I deflated my air mattress, a process that basically involved opening the valve and laying down on top of it. A process that Kyle was quick to compare to Ken’s sleeping experience, as apparently his air mattress had had a slow leak all weekend leaving one able to sleep for approximately 4 hours before being rudely awoken by the hard floor. I don’t know exactly what it was that Kyle said or how he said it but somehow he broke me and I laid on my deflated air mattress for a good five minutes laughing so hysterically that tears were streaming down my face. Apparently it was audible to IIF all the way down the hall.
When I had regained my sanity, I discovered that rccap had managed to find a co-worker to let him into the LNS lounge and had returned with the last of the food. While it wasn’t much we did have some leftover pasta salad ingredients (not the pasta, that was still locked away in my car) and a few wraps. The upshot of this was one last sandwich making endeavor. Tomato, mozzarella and basil wraps and when the wraps ran out, tomato and mozzarella wrapped in basil leaves, oh how unprepared I was for this to last an extra day.
Wandered around for a bit when the food was gone. Plaid Thong on one side of us had long ago packed up and gone home (Saturday night?) but IIF was still hard at work though they looked a little bit shell shocked as evidenced by the contingent of them that had taken up spots on the floor in the hallway.
As I was in about the same state, struck up a conversation. My team and I had been planning on handing out teaser cards at wrapup for WARTRON:BOSTON but as a number of IIF memebers didn’t expect to make it to wrap up, ended up handing them out a bit early.
Indeed, there was apparently an evening snowstorm on the way so if I was smart I should probably consider trying to hand out teaser cards now. Good plan!
Grabbed a handful of cards and started wandering the hallways, surprisingly easy to identify mystery hunters (by the dazed look in their eyes and general sleepless appearance) though I did occasionally guess wrong. Explained WARTRON:BOSTON (or at least attempted to, I wasn’t exactly fully functional at that point) to the various people I encountered and begged them to tell their teammates about it. (We need at least 60 people in order to run this game and while I’d like to think we’ll be able to get that many, I’m terrified that we won’t and I really, really want to run this Game! As a side note, a number of our teammates who had come in from Seattle had actually played WARTRON in Portland last summer and it was really fun to pick their brains about the experience. It was also really amusing to hear a few of their stories and think, “Oh hey, I’ve heard this story from the OTHER side! There was one thing in particular that Mark, jagheterlelle and I were in fits of laughter about.)
But I digress.
Did quite the loop around campus and I can only hope that the people I talked to spread the world. Did I mention that we REALLY want to run this Game?
Back at HQ, my teammates were starting to get annoyed by the unwillingness of the little snake pieces to form recognizable shapes so I think we were all a little bit relieved when word came in at just before noon that a team (whose name was the entire text of “Atlas Shrugged” thanks to the lack of character limits on the hunt sign up form) had won. Interestingly enough they hadn’t yet found the coin, rather they had finally entered the runaround but were significantly far enough ahead of all other teams that Manic Sages felt comfortable calling it.
It would be another 3 hours before they actually managed to “find” the coin.
Aftermath
I’ve noticed in the last few years that when hunt finally comes to a close and my body starts to shut down that my ability to verbalize seems to go first. Indeed while I can communicate in writing (and have no trouble whatsoever swearing up a storm), I seem to devolve into two word sentences where each word is separated by several seconds (and a lot of laughing) as I try vainly to come up with the words needed to string together a simple thought. My teammates find it hilarious and while it’s extremely frustrating at the time I have to say I agree with their assessment. Even better are the times when I reach for the words and my mouth delivers something else entirely. I swear to god at one point I turned to jagheterlelle and said “I need pie.” To which she patted me on the arm and assured me (much as one would a slightly confused child), “we’ll get you some pie”.
“No.... No.... Not pie,” but whatever it was that I actually wanted (which was something to do with cleaning up the room), I never was able to find the words to express it.
Took one final team picture and then started cleaning up.
Wrap-up was scheduled for 3pm, and now that it was over we turned our attention to clean up. Sent rccap out to find my car and was quite pleased (and secretly relieved) when he returned successful.
Loaded up, washed down the tables, swept the floor (Kyle’s earlier sweeping job was declared inadequate by sallythetimid) and found ourselves with about an hour to kill before wrapup. Alas without rccap’s ID card the LNS couches were an unattainable dream so no naptime for us.
Headed down to 26-100 with about half an hour to go before wrap-up and proceeded to pass out WARTRON:BOSTON teaser cards to everyone walking in. I’m not particularly good at that kind of salesmanship and coupled with my current lack of verbal skills, I’m surprised I managed as well as I did. Perhaps people were merely taking pity on the blubbering imbecil that held the door for them.
Wrap-up was fun and then we wandered off to eat free cookies. Oh chocolate, where have you been for the last 24+ hours?
I’d driven around the block earlier in the day (to move my car to longer term parking once we’d finished loading it) and in the process had nearly gotten in three accidents. As this seemed like a pretty poor record for a single city block, quite clear that I was not up to driving home. As such arranged with rccap to take a (5 hours) nap at his house before heading north.
Made it home with minutes to spare before midnight and went directly to bed. I was mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted. Still only barely functional when the alarm went off at 6:30am and I proceeded to spend the day in a haze of confusion and exhaustion. My verbal processing skills still weren’t up to speed and I spent an awful lot of time grasping frantically at words each and every time a student asked me a question. (I also, may, just possibly, have snuck home for a 45 minutes nap during my free period.) Wow, note to self, a post-hunt recovery day is VERY important as evidenced by the fact that I spent every free moment sleeping for the rest of the week and well into the weekend. Indeed my daily schedule for the entirety of the week consisted of the following: Go to work, come home, take a five hour nap on the couch, eat dinner, go to bed. The upside is that my words eventually returned (albeit slowly over the course of the week) though I still haven’t bothered unpacking and putting away the team supplies. They can hang out in my living room a little bit longer!
All told we solved 76 puzzles (51 of which were legitimate solves, the rest were “optioned”).
It was exciting to see the results when Manic Sages posted the team progress graph. More so as apparently we managed to finish in 12th place! Pretty impressive for a small team of people who still consider themselves fairly new to the world of puzzle hunting.
As always I had a fabulous weekend and am so very, very grateful to Manic Sages for putting in the time and effort necessary to produce this event. Actually, let me just take a moment and elaborate on that. I had a really, really good time at hunt (and so did my team). Manic Sages obviously put a lot of time and effort into this hunt and I'd like them to know that their work was appreciated. (Also, I really loved some of the tiny little details (particularly with regard to the thematic elements), clearly there was someone who really cared paying attention to the small things and they should know that it was noticed and appreciated.)
P.S. Contrary to so many other write-ups that I've read, I actually found this year's hunt significantly less demoralizing than last year's!
Let’s do it all again next year shall we?
Part 1