The simple solution

So, the book arrived! I am now, once more, the proud owner of a copy of James Nourse’s The Simple Solution to the Rubik’s Cube. For the second time in my lifetime, I’m once again on the way to cube mastery.

This time around, there’s an extra bonus. This morning, as Rowan was wandering through his morning routine, I held up an unsolved cube. “I bet I can solve this thing before you get dressed and make your bed,” I said. And he was off. (For the record, I won, although to be entirely fair he was distracted by the cat near the end.)

I have also gained pretty much entirely undeserved idolatry from Rowan’s classmates for my cube-solving prowess. That’s the subject of my post this week at Today’s Parent:

[since the book arrived] it’s been a Rubik’s Cube fest around here. I haven’t entirely memorized the solution again, but I’m getting there. These things take more time when you’re in your 40s.

Apparently, my timing is perfect: the fifth- and sixth-graders are totally into the cube. They’re having cube-solving competitions at recess, just like we did back in the day. A friend of mine has already borrowed my copy of The Simple Solution and photocopied it, ostensibly for her own sixth-grader. But apparently he hasn’t had a chance to look at it much, because his dad — an anesthesiologist — is hogging the book.

“My friends say that you can solve the Rubik’s cube in, like, two minutes,” Rowan tells me. This is patently false, but I have to admit I like the idea of having some notoriety in his cohort.