(Mike doesn't tend to write much on LJ or FB, so it's my duty to chronicle it ;)
As explained in
Part 1, my gift to Mike for Valentine's Day was a surprise mini puzzle hunt, which I wrote in my spare time over two weeks or so, mostly while sitting on the bus. I got the idea one day while riding the bus out to Redmond, and my original idea was that I was going to just hide some Valentine's Day cards somewhere in his bookcase (he has a gigantic wall of books in his living room, basically three huge bookcases full of (mostly) science fiction paperbacks) and clue the location. However, after we watched The Princess Bride and he said he'd never read the book, and I confirmed it wasn't in his bookcase, I ended up getting it for him too. (Which is what I meant when I said last Monday I was "reading all day"; I had bought the 30th Anniversary version, started leafing through it in Barnes&Noble, bought it, and then spent the rest of Monday reading the entire thing, pretty much.)
The idea I'd had on the bus was that I was going to hide the cards behind his copy of Heinlein's "To Sail Beyond The Sunset", because I had been thinking of ideas for words that sound like other words, so I broke that phrase into "2 Sale Bee Yonder Sons Yet" -- six words that if you had them all or most of them would make the obvious title, but each on their own would not be particularly obvious.
So I wrote up 6 puzzles, none of which were TOO tough, although they were apparently harder than I thought originally. While on my random shopping expeditions I found some interesting heart stickers, too -- candy hearts and some sparkly hearts -- and some cards, and I even found a ridiculous chocolate puzzle heart, which just seemed too perfect for this:
(puzzle 5 is blurred out on purpose)
We originally planned to go for a walk around the west end of Ballard on the waterfront on Saturday, but when we woke up, the weather sucked, so I pretended to be super-grumpy and told him to go take a shower first. While he did, I basically got all the stuff out of my bag, put the Princess Bride book in the bookcase turned down like he turns the books he's currently reading, hid the Valentine's Day cards behind To Sail Beyond The Sunset, along with another heart note saying "By the way, have you read anything by William Goldman?", and put the puzzle papers in a red gift bag about the right size for 8.5x11 papers and a puzzle heart and stuff. I was going to go fake running around downstairs to try to make him think I might have hid something down there, but then his cat Inky tried to eat the red bag, so instead I just sat with it and waited for him to finish his shower and come out to the living room.
And he did, and so I told him that I had a Valentine's Day present for him that he should work on while I took a shower. He looked at me kinda funny, I handed him the bag, he took out the puzzle heart, took out the papers, read them, and basically had a double-take of OMFG-SHE-DIDN'T-REALLY-DID-SHE-HOLY-CRAP! on his face as he realized what it was, which turned into a huge smile as he sat down gleefully to solve them like a kid in a candy store. I told him that if he managed to solve it all during my shower to at least wait for me to come back before going to the next step. I had no clue whether it was going to be that easy or that hard, really.
When I came back, though, he had basically solved two of the puzzles and was working on a third, the one that required cutting out puzzle pieces:
So I goofed off on his laptop for an hour and let him solve, mostly keeping quiet but occasionally giving vague hints :) He kept saying all kinds of things along the lines of "This is the coolest present I have ever gotten in my entire life" and "I can't believe you made this for me" and "how the hell did you keep this as a surprise?" and the aforemented "I got out of the shower, and there was a puzzle hunt waiting for me!"
The puzzles were, in brief:
1) "I ♥ My Pet" - a logic puzzle involving Jess, Zach, and Mike's cats and dogs, with a bunch of clues about how many toys, treats, and bones they had, with the final question being "How many treats does Sherlock have?", the answer being, of course, "Two". Mike did this one fairly quickly, except that having only met Jess's pets recently, he forgot Omni was a cat instead of a dog, and had the wrong numbers for a few pets. :)
2) "Freely, Purely, And With Passion" - a cryptogram of Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnet 43, aka "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways". The trick here was that it was a caesar cipher with different ciphers for different lines, which spelled something out.
3) "You're Amazing!" - a maze made out of glittery red heart stickers. There were several pictures I'd drawn around the outside, like a duck, a car, a boat, a bee, a flower. But the maze led to the bee. Not too difficult.
4) A word puzzle that I'm not sure I want to give away the hook for here, as we might try to work it into a PH thing in the future.
5) This is the one that required cutting stuff out. I also don't want to talk about it too much since we're pretty sure we're going to turn it into a PH puzzle for real. Let's just say that it was cool and Mike's favorite puzzle of the entire lot, as far as I could tell.
6) "Candygram" - see, the set of candy heart stickers had 8 sheets to them and 31 stickers per sheet. There were no messages that were unique -- ie, for each message like "Super!" "You did it!" "Hooray!" etc, there'd be say, a purple one and a green one... or a yellow, pink, and green one... or an orange, white, and pink one... so what I ended up doing was making letters out of duplicate hearts -- like, for example, 4 hearts that were all identical message/color, like orange "Wow!"s, could make the vertices of a "Y". So some letters were hidden in with the other hearts as noise... at first it would just look like a big paper full of heart stickers.
Mike took about an hour and a half or so to finish five of the puzzles -- he didn't have #4 done when he realized the phrase so far was "Two sale bee ___ sons yet" and said, bouncing out of his chair, "I KNOW WHERE IT IS!", ran to his bookshelf, pulled out the book, didn't see anything in the book, saw the cards behind it, found the cards, found the Princess Bride book, and then was like "But these aren't the gift, milady, THE PUZZLE HUNT WAS THE GIFT! These are just extra!" Then he went and backsolved Puzzle #4 just for completeness' sake. Then he gave me lots of hugs and I kind of lost track of the rest of the afternoon. Apparently I am an epic girlfriend, whatever that means.
In the evening we came back to Ballard since I needed to get some stuff and he was going to take me to The Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner since it's one of his favorite restaurants and I hadn't been there in years, having not been too impressed the other time. However, once we got to the house we ran into Zach and Jess, who were like "Do you guys have plans for dinner?" and we told them, and while Zach said he thought the Spaghetti Factory sucked, he'd only been there once, so why not try it again, just like me. We got Carl to come along too and emptied all 5 of us into Jess's car and went down there.
As it is, I wouldn't say that the Spaghetti Factory sucked, but it still has the problem of NOT BEING THE SPAGHETTI WAREHOUSE, which never fails to make me sad, as that's my favorite Italian chain restaurant ever. (Not my favorite Italian restaurant -- that would be Del's, in Pittsburgh.) However, I had lasagna and was not unhappy with it, which seemed to be generally how people felt about what they were eating. And it was nice to get to hang out with everyone, which we don't do very often. So it was still a pretty awesome dinner regardless.
When we got back to the house, I suggested playing a board game, and so Carl and Mike and I played Starfarers of Catan, which I had not played in YEARS, and Mike had never played. However, before the game even started, Mike managed to drop one of the spaceships on the floor and completely shatter it, which was pretty impressive, it totally came apart and the colored balls came out and everything. We had just been talking about how brittle the plastic is and how the blasters always break the plastic holders off, but that was pretty crazy. Once we got over that, though, the game was kinda fun; Carl got screwed over by space encounters a lot, and I managed to get pretty lucky mostly through having a TON of laser guns on my ship, and won the game.
And so that was Saturday. To be continued...
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