Puzzles

I've never been much of a person for puzzles.  I'll pick something up, fiddle with it for a bit, and give up far too quickly for my own liking.  But for whatever reason, today, I was totally in the mood for puzzles.  I've installed a whole package of brain teasers, logical puzzles, and so on, and spent a few hours today playing with just the first 10 or so.
My conclusion is that what I need to do is fiddle for a while, find a bit of a pattern, and then, much like a computer, break the large problem into similar, but simpler, small puzzles.  Take a sliding puzzle.  Many people have seen them.  You start with, say, a 3-by-3 array of squares, which together form a picture.  It's missing one square, so you can slide the remaining 8 around, randomizing it quite effectively.  Now, how do you put it back together?  (*spoiler alert!*)
I figured out that what you do is put together two edges, and then are left with a simple 2-by-2 square.  Likewise, with a 4-by-4, I can put together two edges, leaving me with a 3-by-3, which I know how to solve. By doing this, I can (given an infinite amount of time, which I don't have) solve any n-by-m slider puzzle.
And no, I'm not going to tell you how I put edges together.  That would spoil the fun. :P
I also had some fun with 'Map,' coloring a group of regions using only four colors, Black Box, an amazing logic game I can't adequately describe, and Bridges, in which you connect dots using a prescribed number of bridges.  Lots of fun.

I'm sorry if this entire post felt a bit like bragging.  I'm just kind of excited about now being able to complete a few different types of puzzles, something I'd never before had the patience to do.  

Today, I'm thankful for puzzles, which can suddenly get me to focus on a problem until I solve it.