Shannon Phillips

Me: Good night, Robin. You’re a good little boy.

Robin: Thanks, mama. You’re a good lady too.

The boys got haircuts yesterday, and while Robin pretty much just looks like Robin with a haircut, Davy is like a whole new child. Who is this adorable little gnome running around in my house?

I snapped a few pictures this morning, although he was eating breakfast, so his face isn’t clean and also he dribbled orange juice down the front of his pajama top. Gritty realism, yo!

My Dad went though a period where he played a lot of FreeCell, an interest which eventually gave way to Sudoku, and probably something else by now. Anyway, Dad, I thought this was a really neat article:

http://gameological.com/2012/04/unbeatable/

Dave Ring is a hard man to find. Given that he launched one of the earliest crowdsourced internet projects—if not the first—one would expect Ring to be something of an online superstar. He was using group power before Huffington had a Post, back when Amazon was just a river.

But when you Google his name—the smell test of millennial relevancy—our Dave is buried beneath Dave Ring the stand-up comedian, Dave Ring the editorial consultant, and Dave Ring the mentally disabled televangelist. Perhaps the web has obscured Dave Ring the internet revolutionary because his project was, from the most straightforward perspective, a bust. In the summer of ’94, Ring led 110 online comrades to beat a video game called FreeCell. They lost.

It kind of goes into the math of FreeCell, and how Dave Ring organized an effort to determine whether each and every hand of FreeCell was theoretically winnable.

So when that final push on No. 11,982—an effort aided by humans and even a handful of game-solving programs—met with failure, Ring celebrated. Is every hand in FreeCell winnable? No. Thirty-one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine hands are winnable. And one isn’t. He proved that. He had solved one mystery of the universe.

Just a fun little piece.

Hope everyone had a nice Easter Sunday—and/or a very happy Passover! We dyed eggs, hunted for eggs, ate eggs, ate Easter candy, ate some lamb and dandelion salad, ate some more Easter candy, and generally had a very nice springtime celebration.

I wish I’d gotten a picture of the boys in their cute dressy outfits, but for most of the day we had them in old, stained and/or dark clothes, so as not to ruin their good clothes with dye and chocolate. Here they are working together on coloring the eggs:

It was a gorgeous day, too. Couldn’t have asked for nicer. Welcome, spring!

A) Davy likes to rummage in the kitchen cabinets for toys. He really likes the baking-implements drawer, which has the cookie-cutter shapes and other interesting things.

B) When he gets sleepy in the late morning, Davy crawls into my lap—often still clutching the last thing he was playing with—puts his head on my shoulder, and cuddles himself to sleep.

C) The two facts above explain why the sleeping toddler I just laid down in bed is still loosely cradling a pie slicer to his chest. I would surreptitiously exchange it for a nice stuffed teddy or something, but hey, who doesn’t like pie?

In other news, Robin is on his feet again, we’ve all still got a lingering cough, the weather is beautiful, and I really need to get my garden planted. I’m also hoping that we’ll have chicks soon: the chicken lady has been kind of flaky. We might have to order some chicks from the Internet (because you can totally do that!) if I can’t find a local breeder to buy from.