Out comes my inner scientist...

OK, let me start out with two obvious things about me. I am a scientist and I like to figure things out. With that, two weeks away from the lab can be a painful thing. While the initial days are nice, sooner or later you want to get back to the bench. Unfortunately, in Eastern Oregon, at least where I was, there was not a plethora of beta cells or islets to get my nitrile gloved hands on. Fortunately for me along came this pseudo-Rubik's cube. This mind game is the property of Rebecca, or maybe Anna, I really am not sure. Actually that has nothing to do with this story. The bottom line is that I was informed that Jonathon, when he was last at home, had worked and worked on it and had not been able to get it done. So, being ultra-super-uber-insert your favorite adverb here-competitive I had to figure it out. After a mere hour of tinkering with it, I got it. Unfortunately for me, being late in the night and still being on East coast time I sat it down with in a foot of the ground. That is right, in the Grace zone. As I looked for it the next morning-within hours of Jonathon's arrival-I found to my despair that Grace had dismantled my prize. I quickly went back to work, and this time it took me a lot longer to get it together. While the first time was done in an hour, the second time took at least three hours of playing with it to get back to what I had stumbled on before. This is where my scientific instincts kicked in:

Being a good scientist I understand that documentation is the key. I made sure to have a picture of me with the puzzle completed, but I decided to (obnoxiously) go one step further. You may ask, what is better than figuring out a puzzle? Well, the obvious answer is mapping out the mechanism by which the puzzle is done. Below you will see the step by step description-lab note book-esque of how to do the puzzle. Now I am not sure where these sort of things are supposed to be published, but if there isn't a Journal of Wooden Pioneer Puzzle Games of a Proceedings of the National Academy of Gamers there very well should be.

So in the end, this is my proof that I figured it out. Sorry about putting y'all though the pain of this, I just had to be a little bit scientifi-itic.