I passed by VideoSmith about five times in the past week without figuring out the change. I even recall seeing a jigsaw puzzle in the window of Mickey Mouse made in a photo-mosaic style and I remarked to Sarah - "I would like to make photo mosaics of my photos". I finally had a Eureka moment while walking in front of VideoSmith that half of the video rental store was no longer for video rentals. It is now populated by puzzles of every kind. In some bizarre arrangement between the Smith family and the owner of Eureka puzzles they are splitting the space in VideoSmith.

I could hardly wait to go inside the puzzle store once I realized what it was. But we needed to eat since it was 4PM and neither of us had eaten lunch. We went to the at the Coolidge Corner clubhouse. I almost ordered a "Drew Bledsoe" because it had chicken and cheese on it but since he is now in Buffalo I thought it wouldn't be good to buy food in his name. Instead I opted for another dish that had guacamole in it but I don't remember the name. Maybe it was a Pedro Martinez?

We split-up to divide and conquer. I went to the puzzle store and Sarah went to Brookline BookSmith. The Smith family is still powerful in Coolidge Corner although their empire has been waning since CyberSmith flopped in Harvard Square above the Border Cafe.

I was walking around playing with all the puzzles when the proprietor started chatting it up with me. I was fond of the metal and wood puzzles where you need to unlock pieces. He told me that there seem to be three types of people. One type likes the jigsaws, the other likes the board games, and the third (people like me) like the puzzles. My favorite puzzle there was a wine bottle puzzle where you could give the puzzle and a wine bottle to someone as a gift and they would need to solve the puzzle to be able to open the wine. They also had one that was for chocolates and another one that looked like a good puzzle for jewelry. Wouldn't that be a great way to propose? Here honey, let me know when you've solved this.

I had a few pieces of Java homework that I still hadn't completed and some lingering internet conundrums that I hadn't solved in the morning relating to making server side includes operate on my web server. So I left the proprietor of the Eureka puzzle store with full confidence that I had plenty of puzzles to solve without having to purchase new ones.

I was completely right. I spent a full two hours on a single piece of java homework for a problem called DebugThis where I just couldn't figure out most of the problems despite trying many different angles. It proved to be a great challenge and felt quite rewarding when I had cracked it. While I was doing that I had to download a new FTP client and learn how server side includes worked giving me the pleasure of having solved two puzzles for the evening. It made me remember what I liked about MIT that most people didn't. I like problems and problem sets. I like them when they are difficult but solvable. Even if I can't figure them out I like that I know that I could with enough time and training. I loved doing chemistry NMR to decypher what a compound looked like, the complex math of quantum physics (which I was never quite good at), and coming-up with a synthesis for a particularly odd molecule. It is an odd thing to love puzzles. There must be plenty of people like me who go right to that part of the store.