A few people from my Sunday school group at church visited today. I still have some of the (less appetizing) candy they brought last time, but the chocolate in this batch isn’t contaminated (with nuts or caramel). When they knocked on the door Talore ran to see what the noise was. I can’t figure out why that noise caused her to run to it, while noises like the AC coming on caused her to jump and look for someplace to hide when I first got her. When they came in Talore wasn’t so sure she wanted to have anything to do with them, though she did get close enough to be petted. I also got her to chase the laser pointer dot while they were here, but she was overly jumpy till they left and spent some time hiding in my bedroom and behind a chair.
I’m going to have to start running the Roomba daily again. Apparently every other day isn’t often enough to not have cat hair completely obscure all the moving parts when it runs. It’s amazing how much hair cats shed while never appearing to be missing any. Hopefully Talore will keep a bit more of it in the winter.
When Talore is moving around on my desk and gets in the way (or starts creeping up on my plate of food) I tend to slide her back to the spot she has cleared off on the end. It generally works well enough because her feet don’t get much traction on the desk surface, but I have to keep her claws trimmed since she leaves long scratches when they aren’t. She finally stopped laying down/sitting between my keyboard and monitors, though now she occasionally just lays down on my keyboard. At least she doesn’t generally do that while I’m in the middle of something.
All that remains of the feathery toy (till I find glue that sticks) is a plastic nub on the end of a thread. Talore was quite willing to chase and attack it at first, but yesterday she got in front of it when I tossed it and got bonked on the nose pretty hard apparently. Before it had hit the ground (from the chair she was in) she had made it over the back of the chair and was well on her way to my bedroom looking back to see if it was chasing. Since then she’ll hit it if it’s on the ground, but the moment it leaves the ground she’s out of the way.
While I was looking for the large bottle of elmer’s glue I was left in college (leftover from a certain Halloween costume) I found my old rubik’s cube. I’m sure I cleaned and lubricated it before I gave up on it, but it’s in pretty bad shape for speedcubing. It’s nice and loose, but turning it feels like the plastic is grating against each other, despite the fact that it appears to be at least partially worn smooth when I take it apart. I guess I got a new one for more than just the fact that the old one had peeling stickers.
According to the site I learned to cube from (http://lar5.com/cube) I should be solving the first two layers (f2l) in around 30 moves when I’m doing well at lookahead (spotting pieces and planning optimal moves). I’m failing quite badly with my 45-60 moves, depending on how lucky I get at the start. I haven’t decided if I want to spend time trying to optimize that (which should greatly improve my times once I can be efficient quickly) or memorizing moves for the more common cases for the last steps. Considering how easily I memorized a couple algorithms I may keep doing that to a point, it just won’t help my speed much.
