Can You Solve These Two Chess Problems in Five Years?

While living in Boise, after I first started playing chess with Mike, I bought a copy of this book, Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors from the used book store in Hyde Park. It is nothing but hundreds of three-move chess puzzles to help practice different tactical techniques. I have always found them difficult, but after many years of keeping it in the bathroom (and so trying a few every day), I've made some slow progress, which means I can now actually solve about half of them.

On the cover of the book there are two problems, with the challenge, "Can you solve these two chess problems in thirty seconds?" When I first got the book, I stared at them for days and never saw anything. These two puzzles alone in the book don't have the solution included, so I'd always found them frustrating. After a long while, I finally took another look at them last week, and found that, with a lot of effort, I could solve both of them. From the moment I first saw the problems it took me about five years, approximately 5.2 million times longer than thirty seconds, which is a fair measure of my innate ability for chess.