I would like to tell you I had a very productive day, but I can’t because I haven’t left the building all day. Didn’t even crack the door. I’ve made three square meals for myself, I built the above puzzle and then watch a 6 part documentary on James Bond films.
I guess you could call doing a whole 1,000 piece puzzle in 6 hours productive…
I went out yesterday and took some photos of the new tire/wheel setup and totally forgot to put the top down. Remedied that today. This morning while I waited on the people who were coming to clean out the gutters I finally finished the 1000 piece puzzle of the Grand Tetons National Park that has been languishing on the table since before Christmas.
We bought this puzzle brand new, so we were the first to open the plastic bag. When we finished the puzzle there was a single missing piece (the hot pink in the upper left under the large sunflowers.)
So we combed the area and couldn’t find it. Making things slightly more difficult was we have the main bedroom carpet temporarily under the puzzle table while they work on the bathroom and it is pretty much the color of the typical cardboard color on the back of puzzle pieces. I went and got a flashlight so I could crawl around on my belly like a reptile shining the light at ground level. I didn’t find it.
What I did find were two other puzzle pieces that didn’t match the current puzzle. They were the two single missing pieces from the last two puzzles we did!?!
Hopefully we’ll accidentally stumble on the current missing piece when we drop a puzzle piece while working on the next puzzle we do.
We had a 1,000 piece puzzle going and were at least 2/3rds done. We did the main picture part and was left with the just lightly shaded green background. Unfortunately there was one very noticeable piece missing and rather than spend the next 4 days struggling to finish it with the empty spot we tossed it the recycle bin.
So we did this 300 piece one instead. In the second photo you can see what Captain Merrill Stubing did after he retired from Princess Cruises.
Jigsaw Puzzles – We are still doing the jigsaw puzzle thing and enjoying it, mostly. This last puzzle looked like it could have been a nightmare judging by the cover if it was one of those with all the same shaped pieces, but it had a bunch of really weird shaped pieces. This did help a lot in spite of numerous times the piece that did go in a spot looked nothing like they’d fit when you picked them up to try them. When we finished this puzzle there was one piece missing. While we would usually shrug, circle the spot where the missing piece was on the box cover photo and re donate it, this time we opted to stop spreading disappointment and chucked it in the recycle bin.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – We are three quarters of the way through with Season 4 with only two more episodes to go on this coming Friday (its really Thursday ’cause time zones, but whatever.) While we are enjoying it, we are not nearly enjoying it as much as the previous seasons. So it was with not a lot of excitement that I learned they’ll be doing a Season 5. I’ll probably watch it, because, what the heck and I still read Beatle Baily in the comics and it hasn’t been funny for decades.
Jack Reacher – Back a month ago after I had watched the Amazon’s Jack Reacher TV series I mentioned that they had introduced a character from the book that really wasn’t in the first book that this series was based on. It is a U.S. Army Master Sergeant from the 110th MP Special Investigations Unit that Reacher was in charge of. Her name is Frances Neagley, but through out the series whenever Reacher says her name it sounds like he is saying Nealy. I wondered if they changed the name of the character for TV, but they didn’t, on the IMDB page it is listed as Neagly.
Miata – The below listed Miata miles comes from yesterday and because it was only 6 days from the last time it was driven, it started right up on the first try. This means that somewhere between 6 and 11 days is the point where the battery voltage drops below the point where the car will start.
One of our recent cheap thrift store jigsaw puzzle finds was this one of the Justice League of America. Growing up, like most kids of my generation, comic books were a big drain on whatever small allowance I was allotted. This puzzle though, really showed how little I know about the DC Comic Universe. I am familiar with the big three front and center here as well as the Green Lantern on the left, but have no idea who the woman is on the left. And in the top background I know Aquaman, the Fantastic Four, the Flash, but anyone of those in the second row, no clue. Who are these folks?
Okay, I went to Wikipedia so you wouldn’t have to. The woman on the left in the front row is Black Canary. In the middle row, from left to right are Red Arrow, Hawkwoman, Red Tornado, not sure who this one is and the last is probably Vixen.
As I mentioned the other day, we have been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles here during pandemic quarantine/avoidance and smoky summer days.
We have probably bought a couple of dozen brand new. We visit our local independent bookstore once a month on haircut day and Donna usually buys one, while I buy an actual book. We have also bought a few at Fred Meyer when we catch them on sale.
But most of the puzzles come from thrift stores, Goodwill sells them for $1.99 or $2.99 and one place in town has all of their puzzles priced at ninety-nine cents, otherwise we probably couldn’t afford our habit.
And what a habit it is too, for the last 10 months there has always been a jigsaw puzzle going on what used to be our dining room table. I have been posting photos of every puzzle we complete on Instagram and early on I was just using the hashtags #jigsaw and #jigsawpuzzle, but after completely a bunch of them I started to add #jigsawpuzzleanonymous, a play on Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, to them because it was looking like we were addicted.
As it turns out, so far, I am the only one using that hashtag, so when I want to know how many puzzles we have done so far all I have to do is look at the #jigsawpuzzleanonymous page and count the posts. There is one post with three small puzzles in it and for one panoramic puzzle of Portland, Oregon I created a triptych with 3 posts so the counts works out perfect. Right now we sit at 93 puzzles in 275 days or about one every 3 days.
Yesterday I had someone like a photo of a puzzle from a few days ago and I went to see his page, to see how he connected with me, and he posts time-lapse photos of his puzzle building. Five hundred piece puzzles in three hours…yikes, but it is fun to watch: For some reason, none of the puzzle builds are available on his YouTube anymore…