Puzzles and Walkies

I did it again. I was playing a very tough sudoku puzzle. Try as I might, I couldn’t unlock the magic key to the solution. Eventually, I made two entries that seemed to have the highest probability, and they both worked. As I was getting to the end of my hour-long puzzle, the rest was clear sailing. (They are not all that long, but this one was a killer. Twenty minutes or so is fairly standard.) All I had left to do was input the remaining numbers — no thinking involved, and not-thinking is something that I am usually good at. It was just grunt work by then. Then. with only a few inputs left, I mistakenly tapped the wrong key. 

Can you believe it? After all of the spinning of the gray matter, my errant finger hit the wrong key. Grrr. 

I mean, I know in my head that I solved the darn thing, but it won’t be recorded as an error-free solution.

I tend to do this more often than not. I drive myself crazy. Why am I like this?

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Meanwhile, we continue to force ourselves to take our almost-daily walks. They’re short, but they are something rather than nothing. Sometimes, when it is later in the day than we’d prefer, we just walk up the street and back in our totally uninspiring neighbourhood. 

At other times, Sue has a photo prompt to fulfill. On the 27th of each months, she is to post a photo of her walking somewhere or other.

Through the slushy park we trod to get to the path by the river. Sue set up this photo with her tripod. She used the phone’s wide angle lens to get all of the path, river and us in the photo. 

Now, we get to the problem of wide angle lenses. Do you see how short and wide we appear? If you don’t hold a wide angle lens straight and level, this sort of distortion can be the result. Accomplished photographers can sometimes use this effect to their advantage and purposefully use distortion to great effect, but most of us need to take care. 

You can also see it in this photo. In actual fact, Sue’s coat drops close to her legs and does not flair our as seen here.

I did try to undistort the first photo in Photoshop by lengthening it and pinching it a bit on the sides. It more or less worked.

Oops. Almost forgot this one of Sue's from one of our icicle walks. I like where red-coated-moi is situated in the frame as well as the overall bokeh.