The saga comes to an end

All right... I finished decoding the second message.  It was actually the first obviously useful one!  We have, of course, lost the slip of paper and I don't feel like spending another half hour decoding it again, but essentially it said this: "The Caesar cipher was easy to crack.  The rectangle cipher with mixed columns will be harder."

Does anyone happen to know what a rectangle cipher with rotating columns is?  If so, I applaud you-- you are either in the CIA or in league with my dad.  I looked it up online.  Using the information gathered-- exercise your googling muscle if you are not working with either of the venerable aforementioned-- we finally understood why we had been given the dimensions of a rectangle!  8x10=80 letters, and it was the easiest part of all to find the coded message that fit the criterion.

We wrote the letters out in the rectangle to decode the message.  But we couldn't read it, of course, because it was a mixed cipher.  So we used the only numbers we had been given-- remember that seemingly useless message? "I love you kids seven trillion three hundred eighty million one hundred ninety-two thousand five hundred forty-three"-- to reorder the columns.  And ta-da!  "Congratulations... tell me the name of the street on which this door is found."  We looked at the picture, named the street, and our rather chuffed father rushed out of the room.  He came back with Tic-Tacs for all of us, as well as individually wrapped packages, which ended up containing more candy-- heaven! 

So what if it was the day after that we finally opened our gifts?  As always, Christmas was defined by the universal weeping while opening the present, followed by the universal weeping when it was over.

Happy Third Day of Christmas!

Eleanor