Thank goodness for Thanksgiving break!

American geocaches are beginning to seem suspiciously homogeneous. So far, I have found at least six hidden in similar places, including the only two physical caches on campus. Damn it, I have not seen a single one resembling the ingenious camouflaged caches Teacher Nano once showed me. Must Chinese Taobao teach these Americans a small lesson in the manufacturing might of Yiwu?

Then again, this pattern gives me more time to read the story behind each location, because that is honestly the only interesting part left. Perhaps this is simply geocaching adapting to America’s great road-trip culture. At least I can confidently write “found” in my log instead of behaving like certain newcomers who search for my cache in Hangzhou, fail without ceremony, immediately post “Needs Maintenance” to pressure me into sending a friend out, and then demand a revised hint and lower difficulty in one seamless chain until the answer is practically placed in their mouths. You only realize how demanding players can be after becoming a cache owner. I wonder whether any of my own “did not find” logs at the beginning of the year caused someone else the same trouble.

Amid the frantic end-of-semester rush, an entire week of vacation seems to have been inserted with almost comical abruptness. ZJUPH happened to begin at the same time, so I decided to make a serious push up the rankings.

Thus I wrote these words while slacking off riding home. Ahem, let me explain: something was wrong with my phone’s hotspot, and my laptop could not connect… Ah, never mind. Let us say I took a nap. (

Oh, by the way, how did you know ZJUPH has a Legends of the Three Kingdoms puzzle? I was one step away from asking a friend to bring over the entire card set. And yet, as of publication, we still have not solved it. How are we supposed to extract the answer?

Last week I attended my church’s Thanksgiving gathering. Watching the brothers and sisters perform onstage, I suddenly remembered our old production of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader at a Thanksgiving program. I dug the prop I made back then out of my photo album for a little digital commemoration.

Treasure this Tianyao who could still write neatly.

In a sudden attack of conscience, the university cafeteria installed an ice-cream machine. After sampling it, my classmates unanimously declared, “This is not ice cream at all! Ice cream without milk is just ice!” Looking at the vanilla-chocolate swirl in the hands of the classmate opposite me, I suddenly remembered the waffle-and-ice-cream sandwiches I used to assemble at an all-you-can-eat hotpot restaurant. So I recreated one. Still delicious 😋

To prepare for Wednesday’s room inspection—in plain language, a scored dorm check—my roommate and I worked together to put every sheet of engineering paper we had used onto the wall. As I admired the wall of masterpieces, fear began to grow in my heart about the road of study ahead. (

Whatever else may happen, reusable mounting putty has unquestionably been my best purchase here.

Last night, I ran through the dark to an SI session for some desperate last-minute cramming. I also exchanged engineering-study experience with a friend at Zhejiang University. (Are you, a full year behind his progress, sure you were not secretly trying to outwork him?) With exquisite casualness, I mentioned that some Puzzle Hunt had apparently reached CC98, ZJU’s campus forum. When my friend replied, “Whoa, it really has,” I delivered the inexplicable reflection, “Whoa, our PH is genuinely famous now.” Sigh. Puzzles have done this to him.

And so, full of confidence this morning, I decided not to review for class.

Puzzle Hunt, launch!

Then I got stuck on the Legends of the Three Kingdoms puzzle.