Here is our prize!
It’s a magnet, and to see the size of it, look at the next picture.
We had a busy December, and fell behind on our puzzle advent calendar. But February 1 was the day we got it done!
This had the usual combo of fun and frustrating puzzles, this time all were themed to movies. Each room was a different movie set on the “Werner Sisters’s” lot. And at the end we found out who the Werner Sisters were!
Battleship Cinematic Universe was a team of two this month, but we had a great movie quiz! We got 12th place! I think that might be a record.
The team names were fun as usual. I enjoyed A Complete Known and also the three plays on Nosferatu: Yesferatu, Nosferatu Fast 2 Furious; Nosfera3 Tokyo Drift
Matt was a big contributor to the score. It turns out the only time travel objects I can identify are the time turner (though I wouldn’t have known from which Harry Potter movie it came; Matt knew) and the magic mailbox that allowed Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves to communicate with each other. Unfortunately, I thought the name of the movie was the Beach House, not the Lake House, so we missed that one anyway.
Matt and I bought tickets for our first outing to the Twilight Theater Company. That’s our neighborhood theater; it’s an 11 minute walk.
Jeri Haile was great as Kendra Ellis-Connor. She is apparently new to Portland. I look forward to seeing her in more things.
The play gave us a lot to talk about on the walk home. It was a good evening at the theater.
Matt came home with an exciting prize from his gym:
We took the official picture and then both realized, “Wait. It’s been way more than 500 classes that he has attended at MeFitness.”
We concluded that he had attended 500 classes since the switch of the scheduling system. Well done, Matt, for attending 500 classes beginning from a random point in time.
Thad passed along this unique puzzle, and Matt puzzled away, completing it in a short amount of time. (Some evening game time was sacrificed. And perhaps some normal bedtimes.)
The puzzle mechanism has a surprise, which has not been photographed so the vast readers of this blog don’t have the surprise spoiled. But I was glad I got to see it.
Matt came home from Christmas in Michigan with puzzles, and I learned that Matt gets super obsessed with puzzles.
It’s not like I had ever seen him gravitate toward a puzzle when they came into his orbit. But I hadn’t seen puzzles in the Orange Door, and I think that was the difference.
This puzzle was two-sided. He did the first side in Michigan, and came home and puzzled together the other side.
He’s got mad puzzle skills though. Very impressive.
When I finished painting the front door, I wasn’t really finished with the job, because I needed to put up the new address numbers. And, more than two months later, here I am finding the time to do it (thank you 9/80 day, and Matt out of town)
When I bought the numbers from Modern House Numbers, I paid an extra $6.00 to get both a vertical and horizontal layout, as I wasn’t sure which way the numbers would fit best. They are much bigger than the numbers that came with the house. Good call, because vertical won out.
Here, I tape the template.
And here, the numbers are installed. Not pictured: a trip to the hardware store to buy epoxy and a specific size drill bit; me slicing open my finger trying to open the epoxy; and me making the holes a bit bigger because the specific drill bit size I was instructed to by was slightly too small.
Aren’t they pretty?
And here you can see the old numbers and new ones together.
Three days later, someone was dropping a package on the back porch as we ask, and said, “Is this 8004?” and I wondered how he had possibly missed both address numbers.
I also put up the new circular mirror, which is not actually new, but new to the Orange Door. I still think those mirrors are too high overall, but the circular mirror nicely covers the hole where the guitar hanger was.
Someday we will repaint this room and I will lower those mirrors.
I enjoyed Matt’s birthday meal at Arden so much that we went back for my birthday celebration.
As with Matt’s celebration, we had the prix fixe menu. As with Matt’s celebration, the dinner ended with cheesecake and sorbet. Delicious!
Our TV has been advertising daily trivia in their main menu, but it only intermittently gives us access. Very weird. It’s 10 questions, and they aren’t hard, but the most I had correctly answered was 9, either by myself or with Matt.
But tonight we finally got 10 out of 10 questions! I was a little disappointed to see that the congratulations screen is just the same as for 9 out of 10 correct.
They could have thrown in some fireworks or something.
Matt channeled his worried energy re: the 2024 presidential election into writing letters for Vote Forward encouraging people in Georgia to vote.
He wrote 300 letters, for which he had to get extra permission. 200 is the letter-writing max.
This is not the first year Matt has done this. He wrote letters last fall, and for previous elections. Here is 2022, for comparison.
