Living With Genius

Day 57: The first puzzle I gave Merry was no longer a challenge. Every morning, I get a small handful of treats and say, "Show me where your puzzle is. I'm going to put sprinkles in your puzzle." He dashes into the living room, sits beside the puzzle as I load the cups and close the lids. "Solve your puzzle!" He head-butts me as a thank-you, and immediately swipes the nearest lid aside to get the treats. I decided it was time to up the game, so after looking at dozens of puzzle feeders, I settled on this one by Catstages. It has multiple ways treats can be hidden. They can go in a pocket and be covered with a blue lid. The blue lid can be gently held in place by one of the white sliders, making it a two-step process: slide the slider, open the lid. The white sliders can hold treats as well, and have to be slid over a pocket to drop the food into it, then slid aside. It took him about ten minutes to figure out how all those secrets worked, but he was baffled by the rotating dial which covers seven pockets. He could smell the food, but no amount of sliding sliders or opening lids was getting him any closer to it. We went to bed with the dial unsolved.

Merry seems to be somewhat like his mama in that he does his best analytical thinking when asleep. I've solved a lot of personal puzzlements in my sleep, waking up with a start with my own version of "Eureka! I have found it!" Sometimes it's a weaving draft, or a warping method. Sometimes it's a word which has escaped my mind. Sometimes it's how something is constructed or how it can be deconstructed. We won't talk about the time it was all about how flying saucers break the light barrier to change course on a dime. I actually leapt out of bed and had pen and paper in hand to write that one down until I realized the fatal flaw in my hypothesis, i.e., no proof that flying saucers exist. In any event, my genius-level cat slept on the problem and apparently had a brainstorm because the following morning, as soon as I opened the bedroom door, he ran over to the new puzzle, spun the dial and sat there crunching his rewards.