Little known fact about me...

So visiting my parents this weekend, I got a rare, special treat: the newspaper puzzles!  In high school and college that page was my coffee in the mornings.  I ask them to save them for me but it's hard to remember, so it just makes me appreciate it that much more when I get the opportunity.

Why, you ask?  A secret passion: the cryptoquote.  I can solve them about 90% of the time.  I've tried to explain my strategy to many people but no one really gets it.  It's basically just being able to see patterns.

Anyway, it made me think about a project I had in middle school.  It was a science class, and whoever broke the code first got a 100% (in the entire class of over 100 people).  If you weren't the first to solve it, the highest grade you could get was a 93.  And you had to write a paper about your strategy (to make sure you didn't cheat).

So of course, I was determined to solve it first.  While I can't find the actual assignment, it basically looked something like this:

192874729019287372820918234871923847198701987239875312712219827349817234987128471294871928741726487126438734983279482739847187263672187361872398174981376481364783478236478326872346781327217327318719981732471678621872387162384761874618726412837198273198273918238716276537816238984798432176

Anyway, turns out that each 3 numbers represented a letter, space, or punctuation mark.  Took me a few hours but I did it!  The code turned out to be something like "DNA is the message, RNA is the...." (yes I solved it first..even CALLED my teacher over a weekend to read it to her..and inform her of a typo).  So after that victory, for about a year, I considered aiming for a job at the NSA doing code-breaking.

While that didn't pan out, I still LOVE doing crosswords and cryptoquotes on the rare occasion I'm able to do them.  Thanks Kelsey for all those books you got me!  Stuck on some of the pop culture ones though :).