Chicken Family Jigsaw Puzzle

 

I just finished another jigsaw puzzle.  This one, a 300-piece depiction of a chicken family complete with rooster, hens and chicks, is a painting by Linda Picken titled "Farm Friends"...she has her own country property out west with lots of different animals on it.  I picked it up a few days ago at a chain crafts store on Newberry Road here in Gainesville.  I liked the combination of all the different colors and shapes in her picture...as well as the bigger individual pieces...

Had Fun Putting Together Jigsaw Puzzle

I recently bought a new jigsaw puzzle titled October Skies, a 300-piece painting by Alan Giana in the Memory Lane series.  It was pleasant to take an hour or so and put it together...I'll probably be back soon at Joann Fabrics off Archer Road to get another one, maybe with more pieces.  They have quite a collection there. This one is put out by Master Pieces, the perfect name for a jigsaw puzzle business...

Back to Doing Jigsaw Puzzles

 

I've been working on a couple of jigsaw puzzles I received as Christmas gifts from my family, having just completed them.  They're quite different, one being a trio of cute kittens looking outward from a basket of knitting and yarn, the other being a library of popular VHS and DVD movies from the recent span of decades.  The strategy for putting them together was also quite different...that's one thing I like about doing these puzzles: each one requires a different approach.  Now I guess it's time to get out another one...I think I have one left over from a few months ago that I never got around to starting...

Enjoyed the Weekend

It's been an enjoyable weekend for me and my family.  Melissa and I enjoyed a weekly 5K walk on frigid cold Saturday morning and enjoyed church on frigid cold Sunday morning.  Another factor contributing to that enjoyment is the fact that while I thought it was fun to follow the ongoing National Football League playoffs, I didn't just sit there through whole games, instead catching bits and pieces of the four contests while doing other things as well.  As for the teams that advanced, two games (Baltimore over Houston and Kansas City over Buffalo) went my way and two (San Francisco over Green Bay and Detroit over Tampa Bay) didn't.  The main highlight was the Chiefs' close victory over the Bills.  Now among the final four teams left to play in the conference championships, I'll pull for KC and Detroit...but if the other guys win, that's okay, too.  When family members ask me each year what I want for Christmas, I always make sure to include jigsaw puzzles in my responses.  I've enjoyed finishing one thousand-piece puzzle this weekend and starting another one right afterwards.  And we got ourselves a walking treadmill for our home use...works great so far, but you do have to be careful to stay focused and not slip up and get thrown off!  Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed deliberately avoiding the political BS going on this election year...I pity those addicted to politically biased cable channels and talk shows that drive their ratings and profits by ratcheting up fear, anger and hate among their audience.  And I intend to stay the course and pay attention to only stuff and people that merit my attention: screw the rest...

If I Were to Compile a Puzzle Magazine

If I were to publish one of those variety puzzle books you often see on supermarket magazine shelves, it would leave out much of the stuff already in them.  Right off the top, I would eliminate word searches...too easy.  And forget the "easy" to "medium level sudoku puzzles, and just about any kind of crosswords...except "codewords", which is kind of fun and which I would definitely include in my magazine.  Although I'm horrible at word logic puzzles, I'm still optimistic enough that maybe if I get to be 100, good Lord willing, I'll finally have figured out how to solve them.  Other logic puzzles based on numbers like kakuro (aka cross-sums), ken-ken and "hard" sudoku are among my favorites.  And I would definitely load up my publication with cryptograms...just can't ever get enough of them.  Oh, and I'd definitely have a few of the puzzles containing two pictures, with a specified number of differences I'm to discover...that's always fun! Mazes are also an entertaining carry-over from my younger years.  Although smartphones seem to dominate people's entertainment these days when they can't get around to plopping down in front of a TV screen to zone out or play video games, I'm still of that old school with my torn-out sheets of paper stuffed into my shirt pocket, containing the above kinds of cool puzzles and instantly ready for me to work on at a convenient moment... 

Enjoying Jigsaw Puzzles Over Holiday

 

A few days ago, Melissa bought a Christmas-themed jigsaw puzzle for us...together with our grown children Will and Rebecca...to work on as a collective, fun effort.  We had a good time with it, and it turned out that Melissa and Rebecca each in turn gave me new puzzles, both pet themed.  I enjoyed doing both the dog and cat puzzles...the three ranged from 550-750 pieces.  For me it's a lot of fun to discern different patterns out of the chaos of the unassembled pieces and making them all come together.  Guess I'll now take a short break before tackling some more...

More Jigsaw Puzzles

 

At the Alachua County Friends of the Library book sale recently I bought a couple of 300-piece jigsaw puzzles...there they are above, I just finished them.  I enjoy the process of putting together these pictures, with each piece a challenge as to color shade and shapes that interact with each other to form the composite scene.  Three prerequisites to me doing a jigsaw puzzle: (1) no large sections...such as a clear sky...in which there are little to no variations on the picture from piece to piece, (2) the pieces cannot be so similar in shape that the wrong piece fits in the wrong place, and (3) the puzzle has to be a simple picture: no special gimmicks such as a puzzle within a puzzle.  The best ones are the 300–500-piece puzzles I can lay out on the tabletop and assemble in an hour or two, like the above.  Now that I'm through, I'm thinking that maybe I should have hung around that sale longer and bought some more puzzles...

Our Recent Visit to Asheville, North Carolina

 

Last month Melissa and I went on vacation to the Carolinas, first in Asheville, North Carolina for a few days and then on to Charleston in the South...I've written about the latter in recent articles.  As for Asheville, we stayed at a hotel on the city's east end, near the Billy Graham Training Center which we visited.  It was a pretty, pastoral setting perfect for retreats...I always felt a special respect for Christian evangelist Billy Graham, whose worldwide ministry rejected partisan and Cold War politics in favor of focusing on spreading the Gospel throughout America and the rest of the world.  He always avoided openly siding with one political party over the other, befriending a long succession of both Republican and Democratic presidents, and even sat with atheist authoritarian rulers like the Soviet Union's Nikita Krushchev and North Korea's Kim Il-sung.  Sadly, one of his sons, Franklin, has plunged himself deeply into fractious, divisive political partisanship, first publicly and repeatedly criticizing President Obama even to the extent of questioning his faith and then unquestioningly siding with Trump during his tenure, even going so far as questioning the 2020 election's outcome...very sad indeed.  But as for the retreat center, I loved it and recommend it for visitors, along with the tours they offer.  That visit we did the second day.  On the third we took the train ride on Great Smoky Mountain Railroads, which starts at Bryson City west of Asheville and goes through the surrounding country, stopping off for lunch at a little town called Dillsboro before returning...that was fun.  While in Asheville we ate a couple of times at an excellent locally-owned eatery on Tunnel Road called East Village Grille and did some grocery shopping at a nearby store called Ingles...I wish this chain were in Gainesville, too.  In our previous visit to this area in 2006 we toured the Biltmore estate south of town and also drove through the Smoky Mountain National Park on to Tennessee, stopping off for a few hours at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge before heading back... but not this time around. We did stop off at the Arts and Crafts Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway about a mile from our hotel, though...I got an excellent 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle there (see photo). I liked Asheville, although when walking around I quickly learned to keep a cautious eye on the ground since there were a lot of steep drop-offs everywhere, something that a flat-lander Floridian like myself isn't accustomed to dealing with...

Still More Jigsaw Puzzles

 

I've gone through three more jigsaw puzzles recently...all of them were fun and interesting.  I have become more selective about the brand of puzzle I will work on: the pieces need to be cut into shapes that don't invite mistaken pieces put together when they are both the same color and without a pattern...all of the above puzzles fit the bill perfectly.  The bottom one, showing a beach scene from inside a cottage, was a 1000-piece puzzle that challenged me space-wise: I had just enough room on the tabletop to fit the completed puzzle, but I had to set different groups of similar pieces aside in bowls while I worked on the rest...just so that I could fit enough of it on the table.  But this new system may well open the way for me to do perhaps 2000-piece puzzles as well...all I have to do is ensure that the specified dimensions of the final completed picture fit the tabletop while I pre-separate most of the pieces by color and/or pattern, working on one bowl at a time...

Tackling Still More Jigsaw Puzzles at Home

 

During my recent recovery at home I've gone through a slew of jigsaw puzzles...the nearby Walmart has an excellent selection.  I just open the box, spread the pieces out on the dining room table, and walk up to the puzzle at various random moments during the day.  I'm about to begin a new one...if you have a free surface to work on, why not try this fun activity yourself?  Besides simply being fun, it also helps the mind stay sharp, I imagine more than popping some over-the-counter pill.  Each puzzle presents its own challenges, and I enjoy tackling them while inviting anyone around to share in their construction. I've completed quite a few...the above three represent my three favorites of late.  By the way, I was surprised by a recent contestant on the game show Wheel of Fortune who said that she engaged in jigsaw puzzle competitions and that there was actually a world championship in it. If that's your schtick then go for it....for me, I like doing them for their own sake... 

Game of the Week: KenKen

 

I'm a fan of number logic puzzle games, and that includes Sudoku, Kakuro, and Hidato.  Another one that is rising in popularity is KenKen, invented in 2003 by Tetsuya Miyamoto and embraced and published by Will Shortz and the New York Times in a series of books...the above one I bought recently at Books-a-Million.  It bears a limited similarity with Sudoku in that each puzzle's grid of rows and columns will be filled with unique integers going from 1 to whatever the dimension size is...hence a 4X4 puzzle will contain numbers from 1 to 4 and one with  a 6X6 grid goes from 1 to 6.  That said, KenKen greatly differs from Sudoku in that one must employ the indicated operation with the marked-off spaces to fill in the numbers.  So looking above again, "1-" means the two numbers differ by one, "12x" means the numbers multiplied together equal 12, "2÷" means that one number divided by the other equals 2, and "9+" means that the sum of the blocked off numbers in the row or column equals 9.  Like Sudoku and Kakuro, I tend to write in the blank squares the possible numbers in tiny form, and then write the solution over them when I discover it.  Also, like just about any puzzle KenKen varies in difficulty from puzzle to puzzle...in the book I'm working on now they start at "Easy" and progress to "Medium" and then "Challenging".  Miyamoto is a math teacher and reportedly invented KenKen as a way to train his students to combine logic and the four basic arithmetical operations.  For me it's a fun variation from the other paper number logic puzzles out there, and I tend to tear pages out of the book to work on whenever convenient... 

Game of the Week: Wordscapes

 

Wordscapes is one of a number of puzzle apps users can play on their smartphone...Melissa installed it first on her phone and I followed suit a few weeks later.  As you can see from the picture, for each game they provide either 6 or 7 scrambled letters and it's my task to fill in the accompanying crossword squares to form real words.  It's possible through a number of games to build up credit that I can use to get hints if I get stalled on a puzzle...otherwise I would have to pay them money to get the same hint.  Yes, these games usually have a premium version that eliminates all ads.  Each weekend Wordscapes stages a tournament that the user can play against 99 others...the field gets selected by when the players start playing.  Although I dig the competitive spirit of the tourney, I also just like to pick up my phone and play a few rounds.  If you like Jumble then maybe this one's for you, too...

More Jigsaw Puzzles I've Done Recently

 

For the few days preceding my admission to the hospital I returned to my old pastime of putting together jigsaw puzzles...from the above pictures you can see that I'm pretty flexible with the pictured images.  The top puzzle shows international postage stamps depicting native bird life, which I got as a family gift.  Next comes "Ralph Breaks the Internet", a Pixar movie that I haven't yet seen: I picked up the tiny-sized 300-piece puzzle at Dollar Tree.  Number Three is an interesting arrangement of fruit...looks like I'll be increasing my consumption of them in the future.  And finally...and the most striking...is a view of Arizona's Glen Canyon National Recreation Center: specifically Horseshoe Bend.  As I recuperate from my surgery I've got a few more ready to open up, lay out on the table, and assemble.  The other day I went to Books-a-Million where I bought the Horseshoe Bend puzzle.  They have some exceptional jigsaw puzzles, even one with 3000 pieces!  For now, though, I have a difficult-looking 1000-piece puzzle showing purple plants (another gift) and a multi-pack (purchased from Wal-Mart around the corner).  Looking forward to doing them...

Game of the Week: Jigsaw Puzzles

I've been doing jigsaw puzzles from very early in my life and have never tired of it, my only limitation being having a large enough flat surface to lay out the pieces and put them together, a surface that doesn't need to serve any other function as I come and go from time to time to work on the puzzle.  I've tended of late to post photos of various puzzles I've finished...for this article I decided to go to the other end of the process...the beginning...and picture the scattered, unorganized pieces before the fun begins, and then take one of a puzzle in progress.  A jigsaw puzzle is a game in which score isn't kept and can either be done individually or communally, the latter with the implicit understanding that anyone passing by a puzzle-in-progress can work on it.  At the start it's a bit tedious separating and turning up all the pieces...while in this stage I almost always separate out the end pieces as well as those with similar patterns or colors.  When selecting a puzzle from a store I'm careful to avoid the ones with two much unmarked uniformity to the picture, such as one with a large section of cloudless sky. It's been a while since I last did a jigsaw puzzle...this one I did here last week was a lot of fun!

Game of the Week: Crossword Puzzles

 

Being someone who's typically pretty good at guessing the correct Jeopardy! answers questions, along with possessing a generous amount of stored-up trivia and knowledge of the English language, I should be better at doing crossword puzzles than I am...but I'm usually relegated to doing the easy ones, such as with the above photo.  My parents were whizzes at them, however, and I remember being impressed by the very difficult diagramless puzzles they would do.  As for myself, unless it's a book that has "easy" in its title or a Monday or Tuesday newspaper puzzle (they get harder as the week progresses), I know my limitations and steer clear of the more challenging crosswords. It's not exactly my favorite kind of puzzle you work out on paper: I greatly prefer Kakuro, Jumble, Hidato, Cryptograms, and Sudoku.  Of course, with a smartphone and that handy-dandy Google search engine, I can fudge a little on the game and conveniently help myself if a clue isn't bringing to mind the correct combo of letters in the designated length of row or column.  I've tried the more difficult crossword puzzles from time to time, but there's one type I refuse to do: puzzles in which some letters can only be accessed from one clue...you absolutely must be able to work on any unknown space from both directions or it isn't a legitimate crossword puzzle! 

Game of the Week...Hidato

Hidato is a numerical logic puzzle invented by an Israeli engineer several years ago.  I first encountered it while browsing my excellent (but sadly now closed) local Borders bookstore a few years ago in the puzzle book section...I walked out buying a couple of Hidato books.  For a stretch of time it was also featured on my Hewlett Packard printer's daily puzzle page: of late, though, I haven't done Hidato.  Its premise is simple enough: starting with the numbers already given on the puzzle's grid, connect them together in a sequenced counting string, going left, right, up, down, or diagonally.  Above is pictured an excerpt from an old newspaper puzzle section some 10-11 years ago containing a Hidato puzzle in the corner. Like all puzzles of this sort, it's more fun for me to avoid the "hints" section and figure out shortcuts and strategies for myself.  Of course, nothing is preventing me from going online and ordering for myself another Hidato book, but since I do have online newspaper archives at my disposal I thought I'd go down that avenue first...

Game of the Week: Cryptograms

 

Cryptograms are encoded puzzles, often appearing in grocery store variety puzzle magazines...the above photo is of one of these.  Each letter in a message is encoded with another letter...the trick is to find certain patterns of letters and pick out the more common words like "the" and some of the two-letter words.  Then, after getting some of the more common letters like e, s, t, r, l, ....you know, the ones Wheel of Fortune automatically gives its final puzzle contestants...I should be able to piece the rest of the cryptogram together.  There is always a threshold I reach after decoding a certain number of letters beyond which I can go back to the beginning of the message and then plow right through it.  Although I enjoy the process of solving cryptograms, the resulting message is often a disappointment.  Unsolved on the page, they all look very intellectual and profound...much like how an unknown foreign language sounds...but like another language, they are in the end just transformations of things whose meanings we are already acquainted with.  The first puzzle above, for example, turned out to be a silly, corny joke while the next one was a serious, positive motivating statement from a famous figure in history.  Once I bought a book of cryptograms at a used book sale.  Unfortunately, many of the quotes therein were by Benjamin Franklin: it got too easy to pick out his name at the bottom of those cryptograms and almost instantly translate the puzzle.  The longer the cryptogram the generally easier it is to solve...the same goes to putting the name of the individual who said it at the bottom.  There are variations to cryptograms as well...one that I like has a category at the top and then lists come coded words that fit it...these also tend to be in those variety puzzle mags...

Game of the Week: Kakuro

 

Thirteen years ago one August evening I found a Kakuro puzzle in my local Gainesville Sun newspaper...and successfully completed it.  Since then this Japanese number logic game has been one of my favorites as I continued to do the Sun's weekly puzzles (until they stopped publishing them a few years ago ), Internet Kakuro, and an excellent series of Kakuro puzzle books with "White/Green/Brown/Black Belt" in their titles, depending on the books' different graded levels of difficulty.  Kakuro has an older name, Cross Sums, which I still come across from time to time in some of those variety puzzle magazines on display in grocery stores and pharmacies.  They look on the surface like crossword puzzles, only the "words", crisscrossing both horizontally and vertically, are instead single-digit numerals that range from 1 to 9.  The number appearing either to the left of a horizontal row or above a vertical one tell what the sum of the row or column's string of numerals is, with the crucial stipulation that no numeral appears twice for each summed number.  Some combinations are unique...only their arrangement has to be determined.  So if you see the number "17" for two spaces, you already know the combo of 8 and 9 are in the answer, but you still have to figure the order. At the start of a game I always go around the grid looking for easy solutions until I get to the more challenging sections...when I get to this point I'll usually start writing the options for each square in small handwriting (much the way many tackle solutions to Sudoku, Kakuro's "sister" puzzle).  As with just about any game/puzzle, there are guides you can study to give you hints to make your playing more successful from the start, but for me part of the fun in getting involved in a new game with its rules and special strategies is in discovering different "tricks of the trade" for myself as I go along.  I almost always carry in my pocket a ripped-out page from a Kakuro book or a puzzle printed off the Internet.  If you're a Sudoku buff why not try Kakuro...but start out with the easy levels...

Enjoying Putting Together Jigsaw Puzzles Lately

The last few days I've been doing some jigsaw puzzles that Melissa, Will and Rebecca have recently given me...always a fun little diversion that I can rationalize because it keeps my aging mind sharper.  The above-pictured ones are the last few I did...I call the puzzle with the space theme the End of Everything (after the excellent recent cosmology book I read by Katie Mack)  because such a scene in reality would be pretty apocalyptic, wouldn't you agree?  Jigsaw puzzles...the ones not done online, that is...are a good way to get away from all the digital gadgetry around me and tone down the technology a few notches.  Still, I couldn't resist showing them on my blog...

Online Newspaper Archives a Source of Interesting Material

In Stephen King's fantastic 2011 time travel novel 11/22/63 protagonist Jake Epping repeatedly finds himself investigating newspaper archives on the Internet...I'm familiar with that because I used to do the same at the University of Florida Library West microfilm room back in the 1980s, years before it became possible to access old newspapers online.  A couple of weeks ago I subscribed to such a service being provided by a genealogy company and have been exploring them once again...guess I don't need to go back to UF anytime soon after all.  With archived newspapers you get a great glimpse at the ongoing news and sports stories...as well as the opinions and assumptions that people entertained back then.  Often it's the editorial page and the regular columns that provide the greatest insight, but sometimes you can get a lot by simply reading advertisements and comics.  And speaking of comics, delving back into the past is a definite trip down memory lane for me as I reexperience the old strips like L'il Abner, Nancy, Calvin & Hobbes, Herman, Henry, Pogo, Miss Peach, They'll Do It Every Time, Zippy, The Far Side, Bloom County, Cathy, and so on.  And it's also very easy to clip and print various puzzles I see, to do later and elsewhere at my own convenience. Unfortunately, the particular service I'm using isn't up to date with my local Gainesville Sun, although it does feature several papers...including my favorite Miami Herald going back to 1911...and Ft. Lauderdale is covered by its own paper throughout my school years in south Florida.  As for the Gainesville Sun, Google has its own free archive service providing coverage from 1981 to 2007. From time to time on this blog I may be discussing some finds I make as I browse through the past.  Seeing how we are approaching yet another presidential election, I'm thinking of looking back at some from the past and how the papers with their editorial pages assessed them just before they took place...