Hi, my dozen of readers!

The Floating Island did not seem to go very well, even though I finished in about one hour.  By the end I apparently only had 6 out of 15 letters, which was enough.

The House of the Three Ladies log is also included after the cut. It was mostly a paper puzzle, so the log is short and not too interesting, until the last 20 minutes when I have to extract the answer ( I finished in about 75 minutes).

The puzzles and Mark’s answer checker (the one here won’t work) are at http://www.markhalpin.com/puzzles/wisht/wisht.html and my solving logs are after the cut.

The House of the Three Ladies

0:00:00

opening

0:00:19

N is absinthe

0:03:34

WHITEWINE, DIETSODA

0:07:07

OUTVOTE, and HOSPITALIZE in the grid

0:07:43

googling for south pacific info

0:09:16

BLOODYMARY (fixes HOSPITALIZE to HOSPITALITY)

0:12:59

GREENTEA for C, EPIPHANY for F

0:14:11

INTENSE for B (guess)

0:18:17

T HOODWINKED (enh)

0:21:57

I is SEVENTHOFNEVER , T is wrong

0:24:21

K innovate

0:30:06

answers for ABC FG IK MN S U

0:45:24

ditched F fixed I to TWELFTH (based on acrostic)  [Not clear what I was doing for 15 minutes. Sometimes I hate these timestamps.]

0:47:22

based on the grid, got RHAPSODY for F

0:48:43

pulled out 133 U, got R THOROUGH

0:51:52

grid is done

0:52:23

heh, nice acrostic letters (BIG ACROSTIC FAIL BTWBDM)

1:01:21

marking squares from foods and beverages

1:11:44

stumped on how to extract. tried binary based on food/bev, vowel/consonant, etc

1:12:53

duh, BACON CODE

1:14:37

CAROUSED and AIRS are correct.

The Floating Island

0:00:00

Confession: I have glanced it this puzzle. All I know is that it has islands (and I have avoided it until late in the process for me). Time to find them on maps

0:00:15

colors are terrible on both my printout and screen, will make do

0:01:31

i see a FARE in the bottom, looking at maps of FAROE islands

0:02:56

FAROE is not in this puzzle. shocked. ok, id’ing islands and pictures I know.

0:03:39

yellow is GREENLAND

0:04:28

light blue is OAHU

0:05:22

dark green is MADAGASCAR

0:05:41

dark brown is CUBA

0:06:51

HONSHU in japan

0:07:17

NANTUCKET

0:08:07

yellow ICELAND… ok, those are all the ones I recognize (confirmed each with google)

0:10:08

ok, put those in spreadsheet, now the bottom…

0:10:15

PASSENGER/FARE, FERNANDO, EYESTALKS, CEMETERY, (RAIN/DOWN)SPOUTS

0:11:31

RING? KRYPTON?

0:13:07

10 pictures below, 13 islands. neat

0:15:21

the very dark one is TIMOR

0:18:13

pink is MINDANAO

0:18:17

are there 3 islands darker than the dots? TIMOR/CUBA/HONSU? hmmm

0:18:41

hey, those words fit in the dots. neat

0:23:00

they all match up with letters they have (ICELAND with C i nCUBA, N in HONSHU, NANTUCKET with U in CUBA, etc)

0:23:26

still missing 5 though

0:30:26

just not finding islands. not the fun part of the puzzle process

0:31:52

giving up on finding islands. will try to break in without?

0:34:12

words at bottom include PERSEUS and CRAWFISH?

0:35:47

so, they pair up one by one, but I only have 6 of the 10 islands

0:47:40

So, if I could match up each picture to an island, I could index into the picture names by where the matching letter is in each island U in CUBA matches the U in NANTUCKET… whatever word goes with NANTUCKET, take the 5th letter. But I can’t pair them up

0:50:04

NANTUCKET and EYESTALKS have the same pattern.

0:50:46

RING&OAHU, gives an R and N

0:51:36

GREENLAND&PASSENGER

0:52:03

CEMETERIES & MADAGASCAR

0:52:24

KRYPTON and ICELAND

0:55:10

 ??C?A RT?? ?R??N?

0:55:30

not great

0:56:27

onelook gives uncharted for ??C?ART*, which is thematic and CORRECT

0:58:33

GROUND is thematic and wrong, but DROWNS is thematic and CORRECT