Puzzled

Welcome, exploratory reader, as I take you on a journey around Palo Alto's Puzzle Hunt.

Yes, the City of Palo Alto has been running a Puzzle Hunt for several weeks now. This surprisingly complex endeavour involves solving a set of clues, which reveal locations in which specially-placed signs have been placed. Those signs show letters which, when collected and rearranged, give some sort of additional clue that you can solve for something else. If it sounds complex, that's because it is; fortunately I have a partner in crime that can deal with the details, meaning that for me, this is just a series of nice walks round Palo Alto, looking for laminated signs.

The Puzzle Hunt has run for 4 weeks, and we've collected all the clues and letters, getting through some nice walks along the way. Of course, as is traditional in the Bay Area, this has involved getting sunburnt a couple of times, but them's the breaks. The final clue this week led us to something called the Magic Forest, which isn't really magic or indeed a forest, but instead is just a small clump of redwoods on the edge of Rinconada Park.

I've also found myself puzzled this week (see what I did there?) with the idea of high school graduation. Yes, it's most definitely graduation season, with the local paper reporting on the graduation ceremonies at the two big local high schools:

As you can see from the above picture, at Palo Alto high, graduating involves getting dressed up in a bright green gown and mortar board. Well, maybe it's not the best sartorial choice, but who am I to criticise?

Obviously the whole concept of this is slightly odd to me. I'm vaguely used to the idea of university graduation ceremonies, although it's worth noting that the university I went to doesn't do them. The idea that leaving secondary education is worth quite this song and dance is completely alien, especially given that there's no specific national standard for what 'graduation' or 'high school diploma' actually means. It's simply a rite of passage, the kind of thing that is loved and seen as massively significant here, despite it actually meaning relatively little in terms of an actual achievement other than... well... surviving high school.

Still, it's a big enough deal that lots of my colleagues take time off to attend, people decorate cars, put up signs on their lawn about their offspring graduating and sometimes even where they're off to college. I suppose if you've made the financial investment that many of these parents have, you want some kind of an output or indicator that it was all worth something. Fair enough.

With graduation over, the long, long summer holidays begin. That's one thing that's not puzzling at all.