IPP41 – the main bit

On Friday morning the alarm goes off early so that Gill can round folks up for the fabric and fibre tour… they all rock up in good time and apart from two ladies who try to escape to the Zoo tour, they make it away fine… so a few of us wander down to the Corner Bakery Cafe and have a damn fine breakfast before wending our way back to loiter in the lobby for a while - the Design Comp judging is underway so we can’t get into the Design Comp Room – although a few folks innocently wandered in only to be told to exit immediately by a stern chief judge. There’s puzzling and chatting and Regan shows me the database he’s created in Access and offers me a copy - which I reckon will be a major step up from my current excel spreadsheet…we agree to swap files. 

About a dozen of us headed back to MKT Bar for lunch and had a super meal before dashing back to the hotel for Robert Yarger’s puzzle box-making workshop… Steve, Brian, Ali and I are all on the same table and we have a lot of fun (and laughs) assembling Rob’s superb kits - his instructions are excellent and all of the bits just fit perfectly. Most of us had opted not to glue the boxes together fully so that we could take them home in bits or experiment with the alternative assembly (the kit builds into either of two alternatives)…we get to run through the solutions and see that everything works before heading out (of course it does!). 

We freshen up a bit and head back down for the buses to the J Bar M BBQ for the Founder’s reception where Gill and I share most of a single serving and we’re absolutely stuffed… the band plays plenty of rock and then Jerry introduces all of the Greenhorns and invites them to tell us where they’re from… it’s really cool to see a couple of my MPP muckers up there beaming!

Gill and I head back on the first bus as my chest isn’t enjoying the heat and then I head up to the Design Comp Room where I fail singularly to solve virtually every puzzle I turn my hand to… I crash at a fairly reasonable hour.

Next morning is the puzzle exchange so when I’m ready to head out and find some brekkie I ask if anyone wants to go to Phoenicia for another breakfast, only for Ali to tell me it’s closed and they’re downstairs in Starbucks already… I fail to get a croissant and resort to a toasted cheese sandwich before grabbing my exchange puzzles and heading down to meet Louis in the ballroom. We set out the exchanges and wander around a bit… it’s going to be a great day.

Louis’ organisation is excellent and we get around the whole lot with a couple of hours to spare, which gives me time to get up to the room to take the obligatory shot of exchange puzzles on the bed just as Gill arrives back from lunch with Deirdre, somewhat sodden due to the arrival of a bit of a storm… we then watched it out the window and it was pretty spectacular stuff - plenty of thunder and lighting and squally winds with the rain literally going up outside our window… a foretaste of what Beryl might be bringing.
The afternoon lectures included an insight into Perry’s assembly process, with some excellent self-deprecating humour liberally tossed in, before Robert gave us a virtual tour of Perry’s gift puzzles (jaw-dropping) - all of which were on display in the Design Competition Room… Rox gave us another update on the WPC and George talked about 3D printing with a live demo during the talks - yes, it was that quiet! (Big Louis ended up taking that printer home afterwards…)

While we were hanging around Tye messaged that he had some puzzles in his room for me so Steve and I headed up and we got a little shopping done ahead of the main event on Sunday…

Everyone congregates outside the ballroom for dinner and we establish an MPP-ish table for some more fun. Food service is tres rapido and before we know it, we’re into the announcements of the next couple of IPP venues and dates - cue lots of happy puzzlers who can make travel plans to meet up again next year…

The evening’s entertainment is a magician called Ben Jackson - great patter and he worked the crowd well, making sure we were all on his side and doing some actual twisty solves, along with a couple of effects thrown in. His card-slinging is pretty impressive and along the way he seriously bends some folks heads with some of his mentalism bits… before ending up with a wonderful reveal of a borrowed, signed $100 bill inside a lemon and a prediction of the exact ending time for the show… After dinner winds up I head to the DC room for a little more puzzling and then crash around midnight…

Next morning is the puzzle party so I’m up early grabbing something from Starbucks and chatting to Lee about how I can service my Clutch Box before we join the rather orderly queue to get into the puzzle party proper. There’s a somewhat unruly scrum at Perry’s table so I choose to wander around the room until the mad rush subsides, which turns out to be a bad choice as I end up behind Brian at the table a few minutes later and he buys the last copy that Perry has… which means I have a bit more cash to spend at Tom’s table a little later… first world puzzling problems, eh?!

Boaz is selling all of his latest locks, including a new one from the design comp - also coincidentally his exchange puzzle, so I just end up picking up a commemorative booklet with pics of his dad’s puzzle designs.

I spend a little while chatting with Jerry about his new puzzles and put my name down for a couple of his big hitters…

By the time I get to Tom’s table there are still plenty of wonders on display and I end up choosing a few to add to the hoard… I suspect that some of them are going to take me quite a while to solve…

Takeshi had copies of the not-quite-released Hanayama puzzle available and I manage to snag a lovely copy of Onigiri from Teddy… Brian (M) had some thoroughly delicious looking wooden bits and I grabbed a copy of Ring the Changes that I’d enjoyed playing with in the DC…

At one point I ended up buying a bunch of gift puzzles from Tye to take back to the UK where I’m sure they’ll find good homes…

There are announcements during the course of the morning about the incoming weather - the tail of Hurricane Beryl is due to hit on Monday morning so folks head out to the shops to grab some food to stash in their rooms just in case we end up with limited options for food – I strongly suspect we ain’t going to starve even if we are cut-off from civilisation for a week or more…

When the puzzle party winds up, we head into the lectures where Aaron talks to us about the evolution of PuzzleCAD, Brian and Sue tell us about their wonderfully puzzling life and Chinny gives us a peek into his turning endeavours. 

The foul weather begins to roll in and we can see the wind and the rain (and thunder and lightning) coming across the city – it’s quite an impressive spectacle… by now we’re getting increasingly dire warnings about the incoming weather and we hear formally that NASA have cancelled our trip the next day… the committee is running around organising things when we’re heading into dinner and we agree to move some of the entertainment that we’ve got teed up into the next day so that we can finish the dinner early and the hotel staff can get home before the worst of the weather arrives.

We rattle through dinner and then Nick does the usual presentation with all of the designer’s names before handing out the awards to the winning designers… we have a huge cheer from our table when the Monkeys win an award for BMSD… and Juno wins the top gong on the night for Hugo… both well-deserved.

There are a long series for thank-yous for all the folks involved in the organising before Perry does a presentation on the host gifts for Matt and Steven, before handing them over.

With all of the formalities out of the way, and IPP coming formally to a close, there is a lot of standing around and chatting - and just a little more puzzling - specifically a couple of folks totally dismantle the Monkeys trophy puzzles and then create a single interlocking house-like structure…much to the amusement of everyone… Rich then decides he can do even better and builds a NOS burr inside the frame - not satisfied with that, he subsequently assembled two BMSDs inside one of the frames… apparently it took Steve until the early hours of the morning to retrieve them…and a few days after returning home he’d managed to reassemble his trophy.

Everyone shifts outside the ballroom onto a series of large tables for some more puzzling and miraculously some bottles of beer arrive, so we’re set… Roger is doing magic and certifying folks for time travel - I think I made it, but it was a close call with the red and blue lights not always getting triggered at the right time.