It’s been over a month since my last blog trends update in our blogosphere group of friends, so here is a new one.

This past month has seen some very interesting new trends! Mike has actually made the list after coming back to life, and with a very respectable 8 posts in the last 30 days. Granted half of those were posts promising a post, but I won’t nitpick at this point.

With an even stronger showing is the artist Paul! At his current rate he could easily hit a once per day average.

Milky has even been able to keep up with an almost every other day post despite starting college. That’s very impressive.

And joining the list is a brand new blogger named Judy! It’s been a while since we had a new blog to read, and we’re glad to have you.

Overall I’d say we have quite the active group of blogging friends, and I enjoy every post.

I have been bitten by the Rubik’s Cube bug.

Last year I bought one off Ebay because I thought it would be cool to have in my classroom, but I never seriously got into trying to solve it. I could do one side, but after that it became impossible.

Stacie went out and bought a real one from the store, and inside were the first CLEAR directions I’ve read for how to solve the thing. Every explanation I’ve ever read online is super confusing. So I started to futz with the new Rubik’s Cube and the directions, and following them step by step, I was finally able to solve it!

Now some people might stop there and be satisfied, but not me. Total there are 7 steps to solving it (using this simple method) and some of the steps require 8 turns! Not only do you have to turn them, but you have to memorize which sides and which direction! I’m not a very good memorizing person. I can’t memorize 100 digits of pi. But finally, after messing with it all day, I finally solvled the cube without looking at the directions, all from memory.

My goal is to be able to pick it up, solve it fairly quickly, and make my students go “wowsers!”