Author: Joe

The weekend

Instead of her usual waking me up at 6 something by meowing insistently in the other room, Talore woke me up at 7 this morning by sitting with her head 6 inches in front of mine purring loudly at me, then as soon as I went to pet her she retreated out of reach.

I finally uncovered my chairs yesterday (I had boxes and stuff on them to keep Talore from picking at the fabric of the cushions).  She still picks at them occasionally, but if I look at her and say “No” she stops.  Talore doesn’t seem to mind that they lean back now (when I first got her she wouldn’t even stand on them) since she both walks all over them and has gone to sleep on one.  She either walks up the chair next to it or just jumps to get to the cat bed I have next to the balcony window where it’s high enough to see over the railing.

Half of the clothes pin I have the feathery toy tied to is missing.  I had it clipped on the fan above Talore yesterday, but she eventually just ignored it and went to sleep.  At that point I figured I might as well take it off the fan so it wouldn’t keep swishing by, but I forgot I had the fan on lowest instead of medium and pulled the cord twice.  At full speed the thread caught on the pull chain, wound up, and popped the clothes pin off the fan blade.  The clothespin twisted coming off and one side came out from under the spring that held it together and the side with the spring flew off, hit the wall, and fell behind something.  I wasn’t paying attention to what direction the sound came from and I haven’t found it yet.

Talore now is quite willing to tolerate going in the cat carrier in return for a cat treat.  For probably a week I would put her in it, then feed her a cat treat (after she got out to start with, then while she was in it when she was used to it enough to not be in panic/escape mode).  At first I figured it was at least giving me practice at getting her in when she didn’t want to go, but she did start getting used to it somewhat.  This last week I’ve been sitting her in front of it, then putting a treat in the carrier and waiting there till she went in to get it.  I have to hold her in front of it so she doesn’t wander away (she’ll sneak back and take it while I’m not looking if I let her leave), but she has now entered the carrier several times without me having to force her in.  Next step is to get her to go in, then feed her the cat treat, though I don’t know if she’ll go for that.

I spent a couple hours working on my rubik’s cubes yesterday.  My average time on the 5x5x5 is 14:36 minutes with four solves.  I should have kept track of the time for each step of solving it, and I know I’m getting faster at the first ones (the ones unique to the 5 cube, or at least to big cubes).  Still, it takes so long to scramble and solve it’s hard to work on it much.  For the 3 cube I went to update my time when I got to work on Friday and was just in time to see Tom updating his times.  His (newly updated) single best was one second faster than mine, and his 3 of 5 was three or four seconds faster.  Calvin still has us both beat, but we’re catching up since he hasn’t been improving his times.  That was part of what prompted over an hour spent on the 3 cube yesterday, but I think I’ve finally got a solid second place single solve time with a 29.13s solve.  It didn’t seem spectacularly lucky when I was doing it till the last step so if I hadn’t been using a timer that keeps a log I’d have thought I accidentally touched it and restarted it during the solve, but considering I had gotten a few solves that nearly matched my previous record that weren’t lucky solves I shouldn’t have been too surprised.  Unfortunately I was getting great times (sub 45s) about once every 5 solves with mostly mediocre times (of 50-55) around them so I only dropped my 3 of 5 by half a second.  It seems like fast solves are now more dependent on me spotting the last steps quickly and not messing up the new algorithms I know than they are on getting a good start.

Also: “something negative about Emee”  I was assured that if I posted that Emee would hear about it.  I’m sure that’s not what Dad meant, but I couldn’t resist.

The feathery toy and the ceiling fan

I ended up just tying the thread directly to the headless feathery toy. That way it doesn’t have enough weight to throw around effectively (which is a good thing, since it means there’s not enough weight for it to bother Talore if I throw it at her), but it’s still interesting enough to chase.

Also with it that light, I can hang it from the ceiling fan (clothes pinned to the outside edge) and not only is it too light to damage anything it hits, but it mostly hangs toward the center of the fan since it has so much drag for its weight. If Talore actually catches it well enough it comes unclipped (that’s happened once) and the clothespin flies off somewhere, but she almost never manages to grab it.

Solved

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I figured out a way to do the step that I was stuck on for the 5x5x5 rubik’s cube last Saturday.  Tonight I finally got around to timing a solve.  It took me 18:43.31, no inspection time, but I completely botched the end of a step and spent a couple minutes recovering.  I don’t think I’ll be practicing that one as much as the three, though I may go look up a faster method for solving big cubes, and I will be doing a few more timed runs at some point to see if I can improve on that time.

I also managed a 3x3x3 time of 37.69 seconds today. Combination of a very lucky start (maybe 4 turns to finish the first step), and a skipped later step. Later on I improved my 3 of 5 average by a few seconds (without even using the 37s solve), but I don’t know if either is fast enough to reclaim 2nd place on the board at work.

My 2x2x2 cube has finally been dug out of the pile of stuff it was in and reassembled. I ordered replacement stickers for it since it’s been blank for over a year now (the clearish plastic stickers it came with were terrible, red and orange looked the same to me).  I might get a new 2x2x2 cube too if I can’t get the one I have (Rubik’s Ice Cube) to turn a bit better. My impression is that the plastic is too stiff and has no flex, but it could just be that the lack of springs means everything is held together too tightly for it to rotate as freely as I’d like.