Last Entry's solution, Reaching the Equinox

Down the page is the solution to last entry's logic problem, but if you are still doing it, don't give up yet. I included the following hints to  help you sort through the challenge before you scroll to the answer table.

Hints

From Clue 1., as well as there being no such leprechaun as Smiley O'Riley, one should reason that there are also no such leprechauns as Bleary O'Leary, Greeny McSweeny, Tally McNally, Whirly O'Hearly, or Greeny Mc'Nally. Greeny then wasn't the one with the pocket watch who hid his gold in a tree (Clue 2). McSweeny didn't use the well nor clay pipe nor the hayloft in Limerick, therefore no gold watch nor well in Limerick (Clues 3 and 4). From Clue 3., there is no leprechaun named Tally O'Riley, neither Tally or O'Riley then used the clay pipe. The well was either in Cork or Galway. There is no such leprechaun is Bleary O'Hearly (clue 4). From clues 1 and 5, we see that O'Riley didn't possess the pewter flask; there is also no Whirley McNally, so from the previous clues McNally's first name is either Smiley or Bleary. In clue 6, it can be deduced that the fifth leprechaun not included in the list is the one from Limerick, thus Smiley wasn't in Limerick. If the flask belongs to the bog leprechaun, the pipe belongs to the well leprechaun, and the walking stick belongs the manure pile leprechaun from Meath (not Limerick, Galway, Cork or Kildare) (clue 7), and the watch with the hollow tree leprauchaun, the tin whistle thus belongs to the hayloft trickster in Limerick. Thus O'Riley, not Smiley (from clues 1 and 6) owned the tin whistle, and from clue 5, we determine that his first name was Whirly. Using Clues 6 and 1, we eliminate McNally as the walking stick owner/manure pile leprechaun from Meath county. I could go on, but the rest of the puzzle should logically solved from here on in.

First Name	Last Name	County	Lucky Charm	Hiding Spot
Smiley	McSweeny	Cork	Pocket Watch	Hollow Tree
Bleary	McNally	Galway	Clay Pipe	Brackish Well
Greeny	O’Leary	Kildare	Pewter Flask	Peat Bog
Whirly	O’Riley	Limerick	Tin Whistle	Hayloft
Tally	O’Hearly	Meath	Walking Stick	Manure Pile

I wish I were able to add something else cheerful and positive to this entry, but today greeted me with some grief: my own challenge is to tear it apart with some focus, common sense, and logic. I'm faced with using my day to do my best to muddle through it. I'll just say that I'm at least glad that we've reached the point where the days are getting longer than the hours of darkness.

Blockages and Drainages, Logic and Leprechauns

I'm glad to say that the spring thaw has been coming aggressively throughout the past week here. It's still not quite warm enough to allow me to roost out on the deck to enjoy morning coffee/tea and my post-breakfast reading in the fresh air though. I'm hoping that will be possible within the next couple of weeks if the melting continues at this rate. I hope to be cycling then too as the streets get drier. For now, it still gets cold enough overnight to freeze things hard and thick enough to restrict all the run off from flowing away and draining properly. This part of the season seems to be a direct reflection of the way my own mind is working now*.
   
There has been a lapse between now and my last entry. It's because since I began la vie sans TV, I've been taking advantage of the extra silence and liberation from one less distraction, and I have been shifting my attention and focus to another writing project. I think the overall concepts of it are sound, but I'm still having problems with transposing the things from my notes, tables and spreadsheets into a workably progressive, and manageable flow of content. There doesn't seem to be enough time in the world to allow me to fix this stuff up right; especially not while working full-time hours, plus doing my unit chair position duties. The lightning bolts of originality and creativity just don't seem to be striking me as frequently anymore. The week off I had at the beginning of the month, although I welcomed it, didn't do as much to help me sort out things as I had hoped.

I took a break before I began this paragraph; a spell of creativity did manage to seize me. I directed it to fashioning something through writing that I enjoy doing: a logic problem. I do them once in a while. They are made for more esoteric and quirky personalities and are the less popular of the pen and paper puzzles, much less so than puzzles like Sudoku or crosswords, and sadly they seem to be a dying art form. They are to the puzzle magazine world like what polka is in the music world. I know the magazines dedicated to them are becoming harder to find. It's a shame too, because logical thinking is something that the world needs more of. I guess I like to retreat to them, and create them, because working with this kind of hard pure logic is compensation for feeling too often deprived of just being able to just verbally bash some common sense into some people I'm forced to interact with when I've exhausted all my tact and patience. Given that St. Patrick's Day is winding up quickly, I used an hour and a half of time to burn away some insomnia to compose this puzzle. The inspiration came to me from reading one of my cousin's posts on Facebook. I tested it, and the solution works. I'm still trying to figure out where to get these things published for a little extra cash. I risk showing everyone the weird way my mind works. I should have stashed it away in my portfolio of other such problems I made, but I thought I would share and sacrifice this one to the public, for anyone else who is up for the challenge. I crafted and pasted a logic grid for your convenience, to be found on the bottom of this entry. I'll post the solution in my next entry. St. Patrick's Day may have passed by the time you read this, but I hope you get a kick out of doing it anyway. All names used in this puzzle are completely fictitious.

The Leprechauns

The leprechauns of Ireland come out of seclusion once in a while to roam the land and collect treasure; and at the end of the day, the miserly little fellows make it a habit of returning to, and adding to, their hidden pots of hoarded gold; which in truth are found in far less enchanted places than at the ends of rainbows. If you’re lucky enough to find one and stealthily follow him, he may lead you to his preferred treasure hiding place. Leprechauns pretty much all look and dress alike; they usually can only be told apart from each other by whatever single prized possession they carry on their person. This ordinary looking possession they carry is actually their characteristic magical “lucky charm”. There are five such leprechauns in this problem, each one of them lives in a different Irish county. From the seven clues below, can you correctly sort out: the first and last name of each leprechaun, which county each one lives in (and keeps his treasure), which distinguishing lucky charm each one carries with himself (like a pocket watch that can detect where gold can be found), and which strange location each one stashes his pot o’ gold?

1. Smiley O’Riley has lovely lyrical ring to it; but this is not the full name of any of the leprechauns. In fact, none of the leprechauns’ proper first and last names rhyme together at all. However, the bearer of the magical tin whistle has either the first name Smiley, or the last name of O’Riley (who never goes near any peat bogs). When the tin whistle was played, it stunned the senses of whoever heard it, so that the leprechaun could have ample time to make a hasty escape from greedy people who found him or his gold. Greeny never possessed this enchanted object, neither did McNally (whose pot of gold isn’t in Meath county).
2. A pocket watch that magically signaled an alert to its keeper for the presence of gold was a mighty useful thing to have for indicating which unsuspecting strangers to pick-pocket. McSweeny, a very absent-minded leprechaun, also often used it to locate the right hollow tree when he lost his way in the thickly wooded forest (not in Kildare county) where he kept his hoarded stash. 
3. While walking home one evening, Mrs. O’Hara was scared half to death when she spotted an impish little figure crawling out from a derelict roadside well.  The locals never used it anymore because the water in it had long ago turned brackish and undrinkable, and some claimed that it was haunted by spirits. The clever little leprechaun she encountered took advantage of the well’s reputation and neglect, and had used his long stemmed clay pipe as a snorkel while he secretly dived in there to stash his gold coins in the submerged pot. This well wasn’t in either Meath or in county Kildare; nor did Tally or O’Riley use this place to hide their treasure.
4. It was near dusk when Mr. O’Toole, a farmer in Limerick, thought he heard a strange sound coming from the hayloft of his barn. When he went to inspect the place, he could have swore that he caught a glimpse of a shadow of an odd-looking little fellow, but he felt a bit dazed and thought it was just his weary eyes playing tricks on him. Neither Bleary nor O’Hearly was responsible for this commotion. Greeny didn’t do it either.
5. The constantly tipsy leprechaun with the pewter flask was also the one that always stank like the vile peat bog where he frequently visited to cache his gold. Very few curious people wanted to follow him. His first name wasn’t Whirly, his last name wasn’t McNally, and he never lived or roamed around Cork County. Whirly and McNally actually weren’t from that county either; one of these two did have a tin whistle, while the other one kept his gold in Galway County.
6. Four of the five leprechauns were: the one who drank from a pewter flask that turned bog water into whisky, Tally (who wasn’t in Limerick), the mischievous trickster from the county of Galway, and Smiley (who hid his gold in either a hollow tree or the brackish well).
7. A sneaky young vagrant, named Rowan McManus, secretly followed a tiny stranger who headed towards a great mound of rotting horse manure by a potato field. The little fellow poked his walking stick in the pile three times, and all of a sudden a pot of shimmering gold coins magically rose out of the dung heap. The leprechaun then tossed a few more coins into the pot, which then sank back into the compost pile and was once again concealed from view. The leprechaun suddenly caught sight of the astonished McManus, who witnessed it all while hiding behind a hedgerow. With an elfish grin and a wink, the leprechaun then said, “Well ya didn’t seriously think I was going to dig through all that mess, did ya?” Rowan left there and quickly returned after finding a shovel, and then he dug around and rummaged madly all day through that manure pile like the greedy fool he was, but he never did find any of the gold, and he never saw this rascally leprechaun (who wasn’t O’Riley) ever again. This incident never happened in the counties of Cork, Kildare or Galway.

*- I'm also pissed off about recently discovering that my dishwasher (something I deem as an essential time-saver) has also all of a sudden failed to drain properly. I stayed up until 2:00 AM last night trying to fix the damn thing to no avail. It represents yet another inconvenient blockage coming along my way, both reminding and frustrating me about how stuck I'm feeling about so many other things.

In Like a Pride of Lions/ Re-Evaluating Education

As happy as I am to see the wretched month of February pass, I can't say that I'm any more relieved that March has finally arrived. "In like a lion . . ." just isn't a sufficient enough of a simile to describe the coming of this month in this province. Yesterday was the coldest March 1st on record for many places in Saskatchewan, including here*. The extreme cold has been twisting a real crappy beginning into my string of days off in the weirdest and unexpected of ways. It is yet another proven case of the fates conspiring against me whenever I yup myself into doing any part of a night shift, or to try make some extra coin. I was already short of a lot of sleep as I worked overtime prior to the last night of my last evening shift. Hoping to just collapse into bed and go into some sort of coma, I instead was pestered all night by false alarms from the fire detection system. I don't take blaring fire alarms lightly, especially since after the building just across the street went up in flames last fall. For the first time, the residents evacuated and were forced outside to stand in the wicked -42 below temperature. It's suspected that the sensors downstairs were being buggered up and triggered by the super-condensed, car exhaust-laden cold air drafts coming in from the lower parkade entrance. Whatever the case, the alarm bells were set off several times over night, and for the day after; with cumulative loss of a night and a half of sleep, I was completely dead to the world throughout most of yesterday. I just got to be thankful that there was no actual fire emergency to contend with.

The exhaustion and the miserable frigidity outside didn't make me feel compelled to do much of anything; but I did make the effort to escape the place in late morning to avoid the noise from the service repair and system testing that they were following up with after that night's incident. I used that time to volunteer some help for my friend get some electrical supplies for a home improvement project. I thought the trip might give me some inspiration for doing similar stuff around my own home, but I was too brain dead to be ignited with any ideas for such things. My back and legs were stiffening up too much to do the running that I should have been doing as part of my training program. I could only handle absolute stillness and silence. It ended up being a wasted day for me.

Today, I've been trying to compensate for yesterday's lethargy. I occupied myself all morning with laundry, housecleaning, filing and taming of paperwork, and noting all my stock shortages to shop for later. Now that the slate has been cleared of that stuff, I'm now exploring options for the remaining week or so I have to be absent from work. It began with taking my head offline** to allow my brain to reboot itself. The insomnia left me stricken with a massive headache anyway, and my eyes were too sore for reading or viewing screens after I came back home.

Now that I'm re-invigorated, I'm going to share what I'll be doing this during frozen time off. If I can't physically go anywhere, I have to do different things with my brain to take it to different states and places. I've been thinking more about I feel I need more formal education to do any meaningful shifting of career, moreover, I've been wondering where in the hell am I going to find the time and money for it. I become very sickened and bitter when I start thinking about the current paradigm of post-secondary and polytechnic education for so many reasons: too many to list here. I predict a disaster coming ahead socially and economically if the universities and tech school administrations in this province don't pull their heads out of their asses soon enough, and start designing curricula and programmes that reflect the times coming ahead, i.e. considering the rate in which technology is changing things.***

For now on my personal time with no TV to distract me, I'm sticking to the fundamentals of staying sharp mentally for what ever is to come.

• memory (re)training/logic puzzles
• programming/language learning
• increasing my own general teachability index
• learning more life hacks/template creation for efficiency
• using Creative Commons and other free open source online university programmes 
• finding other projects and useful and demonstrable applications for them, and to make a recognizable portfolio in lieu of a certificate

How ironic it is that the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs: the richest and greatest technical innovators of our time, were college drop outs. Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on Earth, says "The best education you can get is investing in yourself. But this doesn’t always mean college or university".

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-trashes-higher-education-says-its-not-for-everyone-2012-5#ixzz2uxmqKzWu
He sent none of his three children to college. Even though he has formal university degrees, the only certificate he has on display is one for the Dale Carnegie Public Speaking Course, which only cost him $100.

*- With the wind chill accounted for, it was -52° Celsius here in this town.
** - I was strictly audio. No computer, no books, and no TV; I turned my cable service off for spring and summer.
***- Have you ever just looked at the apps on your smart phone and wondered how many human jobs these things have eliminated?