Of course, I first met Amanda after seeing her amazing conversation with Chicago.

Shama and I took a day to drive through Pisgah National Forest, stopping at Lookingglass Falls and Sliding Rock before getting on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  You know what’s not on the Blue Ridge Parkway?  Gas stations.  You know what else isn’t on the Blue Ridge Parkway?  AT&T service.

So we were a bit freaked when all of a sudden Shama said, “Oh no, the gas light’s on!”  I had remembered seeing a while back that it was 16 miles to the next exit from the Parkway and our car’s handly onboard computer told us that we had 9 miles of cruising range before we ran out of gas.  Ruh-roh.

Shama drove like a pro, coasting down the mountain as much as possible, breaking as little as possible, flying off sheer rock cliffs as little as possible.  As we came into town we may or may not have gone through an interminable red light before making it to a gas station.  The result: 16 miles with 2 miles worth of gas to spare!

Sometimes it’s hard to understand someone’s reaction until you experience something for yourself.

Okay, so the dog beach is basically the greatest place on earth.

My wife indulged my obsession with puzzles by giving me a mini puzzle-hunt on my birthday.  Solving it told me to meet her at a bakery where I was given a cupcake, taken to lunch, and then given another puzzle!  As if the best birthday present ever wasn’t already enough.

I’m lucky.  Shama, you’re the best.

We don’t have a lot of magazines in the bathrooms at work.  They tend to linger for months, or even years.  One day, many years ago, I started leafing through an old issue of Rolling Stone while taking care of business and I came across this article (pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) about something called The Game. Ever since then I’ve wanted to play in one of these Games — yes, with a capital ‘G,’ and I think it’s warranted. Unfortunately, they’re never held in Chicago, they cost thousands of dollars, and I think they’ve been discontinued due to an injury.

The crux of the idea is this: Teams gather at a starting line where they are given a puzzle.  The solution to the puzzle leads them to another location where they encounter another puzzle, and so on until they reach the finish line.  It sounds simple enough, except the puzzles are so complicated they often take hours to solve.  These games tend to attract a somewhat narrow sliver of the populace, heavy on computer programmers, mathematicians, and technical-types.  In other words, nerds.

My wife, planning an elaborate game of her own, heard about a puzzle hunt being run in Chicago — much less elaborate than The Game, but the same general idea.  Knowing my obsession, she encouraged me to play.

DASH or “Different Area Same Hunt” is a game run simultaneously in several different cities. Players in each city are given the same clues, but are sent to different locations.

For our first Dash, I was quite pleased with our team.  We got through all the puzzles and only needed a hint on one of them.  Sure, we weren’t the fastest team in the bunch, but we had a lot of fun.  I’m looking forward to DASH 4!

Here’s an example of one of the puzzles:

I wish it wasn’t filled out so you could experience it for yourself, but you can get puzzles from the previous two DASHes on the DASH Website.

SOLUTION:

1. Answer all of the crossword-style questions on the first page.  A “Sparkly Vampire” is Robert Pattinson.
2. Figure out that the picture and letter squares make rebus-style puzzles.  The “++-++” notations under each clue denote whether the next photo or letter is added or subtracted.
3. Find the squares in the photo grid that make up each actor’s name.  Robert Pattinson is Rod (Stewart) – D + Bert + Patton + Sun.
4. Outline the squares you just identified with each actor.  Once you have found every actor’s squares, all of the squares will have been used except for the numbers.
5. Each actor’s squares will form the shape of a letter.  Use the orientation of the numbers to determine the orientation for the letter (to avoid the ambiguity of a C or U, M or W, etc.)
6. Put those letters in order to get the answer: CENTRIFUGE.

Every year I worry about how Journey to the End of the Night is going to work out and every year it’s fantastic.  Once again I was a staff chaser — this time chasing people in a suit.  It wasn’t as bizarre as the gorilla, but runners rarely thought a dude in a suit would start chasing them.

I’d say my favorite moment was standing alone on the beach between checkpoint 2B and checkpoint 3 and chasing people across that big sandy expanse.

The starting line

Stats:

Starting Runners: 749 (biggest Chicago Journey ever!)
Starting Chasers: 12 (4 on bikes)
Surviving Runners: 174
Percentage Who Survived: 23.2%

Map:

Video:

Shama tried to surprise me with a dog for my birthday, but the shelter wouldn’t let her just grab a dog and put it in a box.  I know.  I don’t get it either.  So instead she surprised me by picking me up and taking me to the shelter to meet a dog she had picked out.  His name was “Mugs” and I loved him immediately.

We changed his name briefly to Maurice, but settled on Gus.

Gus and I have some similar features.  Shama says she has a type.  I’m reminded of this scene from 101 Dalmations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv1FlfdJxho

Finally, I got my chance to play robot scientist.  My wife got me a black market Roomba for Hanukah a few years ago and it dutifully cleaned our house for several months before it started behaving strangely. Eventually it quit altogether.

Luckily, the Internet has a wealth of information for people wanting to fix their ailing Roombas. The Roomba itself, however, does not make it easy.  I figured there was about a 20% chance of the thing working at all after I opened it up and tinkered with its soft white underbelly, but a replaced IR emitter, a decent soldering job, and about 5,000 tiny screws later, Roomba is once again keeping our house clean from dust bunnies.

If anyone comes across this page with a Roomba that just backs up and spins until it stops and beeps 9 times, here’s what you can do to fix it: http://www.schneordesign.com/Avi/irobot/roomba_mod2.htm

My cousins rarely sit still, and my brother’s dog even rarer still.  That only makes this picture more amazing and speaks to the powers my wife has over children and animals.  I’m not sure what she was telling the four of them, but they were totally engrossed.  She’s going to be a great teacher… or dog hypnotist… or both!

This is my third year helping out with the Chicago edition of Journey to the End of the Night and it keeps getting bigger and bigger.  The first year (that I missed) had 75 people.  In 2009 we had 271 players.  In 2010 there were 404.  This year we have over 800 people saying they’re going to play on the Facebook group.  That’s some exponential growth, yo!

While the game itself is quite clever, what makes it great is how unusual it is to get hundreds of people together to play a game for no greater purpose.  I had the following conversation with someone at work:

Me: You should come it’s gonna be fun.
C: I think I will.  When do I need to sign up?
Me: You don’t.  Just show up.
C: How much does it cost?
Me: It’s free.
(C in dumbfounded silence.)

If you’re interested and want to play, the game starts at Welles Park at Montrose and Western at 7PM on Saturday May 7th, 2011.

I will be a staff chaser again this year.  I need to come up with a better costume than the gorilla.

Everyone was talking about this epic blizzard that was going to hit Chicago.  Man, was I excited.  With some rare foresight, I set up a camera to take timelapse photos during the whole thing.

Well, that didn’t work.

I purposefully picked a spot with street lights so it would be visible at night, but maybe I left the flash on or the lights in the room were left on… I don’t know.  In any case, you can’t see squat during the night.  Poop.

Here’s someone who knew what they were doing:

On our way home from the water park, I really wanted to make a detour to my old summer camp.  It was, as expected, closed for the winter, but it seemed a shame not to at least peek inside.  So, in the glorious tradition of camp sneak-outs, I had a camp sneak-in — otherwise known as tresspassing.

Aside from some fresh paint on the cabins it looked pretty much as I remembered it.  It was strange to have the whole place all to myself, totally quiet.  There was something very peaceful about it.  Peaceful, that is, until the ghost stories of crazy people who roamed the woods started running through my head.

I told Shama we better go.