Why I Oughta...

I'm not exactly sure WHY I started to try to learn how to solve - after all these years - a Rubik's Cube, but over the past three-plus weeks, I've been working on scrambling and solving whenever I'm sitting on the couch and have a little time to waste.  Thanks to YouTube - and the fact that you can slow videos down playback speed-wise - I have gotten pretty good at solving a lot of the cube by memory.  I still don't have the last few steps memorized, but I'm continuing to work on it. The video that I used was this one that features WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez showing the steps he learned.   What solves and algorithms do I have down? Bottom white face.  Done. Bottom two rows.  Done. Yellow top face.  Done. What algorithms don't I have committed to memory (just yet)? Setting the corners.  Sometimes this just happens naturally, so I skip it.   And doing the final solve.

Back on May 7th of this year, I shared a couple of photos and talked about my initial excitement of giving the art of bonsai a shot with a piece of nursery stock that I picked up at Home Depot for $10 .  It is a Cypress Hinoki and had one large(ish) trunk that seemed to have decent trunk taper, very little reverse taper and priced so cheaply that if I killed the poor thing, I wouldn't be that upset. In that initial post, I talked about how I was following some of the Mirai Bonsai Basics video directions and started with the roots and trunk.  More recently, I moved on to the next few steps and began to try to prune the Cypress into a bonsai of sorts. I know that every article you read talks about how you aren't supposed to prune more than 30% of the tree at any one time and that pruning an evergreen like this Cypress is best done in the late fall when it the tree is heading to dormancy.  But, I couldn't, umm, help myself.  I dove right in. I began by prun...