V-Cube 6

For Candace and my one-year anniversary, she got me a gift...not just any gift, but a custom-made 6x6x6 Rubik's Cube from Greece officially called the V-Cube 6. Despite being very daunting, I was able to solve the cube the night I got it, but I generally attribute this more to a little luck than some intense logic. See, although I can easily solve most of the cube using the algorithms I know from solving all of the smaller cubes, there's one part of the solution that's still giving me trouble: solving the last pair of centers. While I've solved the cubes many times by now and therefore always end up solving the hard part, it's not horribly fast yet (or even consistent).

But, the really interesting story about this cube is not how I solve it, but how I got to put it back together...

After solving it three times, I showed it to my then somewhat drunk roommate Evan, who then proceeded to pretend to hit the cube with a bat. Unfortunately, he didn't take into account that he would need to catch the cube...instead, it hit the floor and exploded into hundreds of pieces like a multi-colored frag grenade! As you can imagine, we were both in shock, especially considered how dramatic the whole explosion was, pieces flying everywhere. Naturally, when Evan found out where the cube came from and how much it cost, he was even more dismayed. Regardless, I was able to put it all back together over the course of an hour or so, and nothing was broken-broken. Actually, the whole experience proved to be quite intriguing, and I wasn't really all that upset anyway, so no big deal. =)

Although the cube's not perfect (it's pretty fragile and pieces will pop out intermittently if you're not super careful, a condition present even before Evan dropped the cube), it's still really fun to solve and has certainly replaced my 5x5x5 as my favorite cube. Now I just need to get the 7x7x7 (and perhaps the 11x11x11 when it comes out)!

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