More Black & White Puzzles

Educa produced a series of black and white puzzles, as did Eurographics (possibly the same company?). Here are some images of puzzles borrowed off of Amazon. I especially like the Lisbon 1500 piece puzzle ... straight onto my wish list!

Country Romance by Educa

Still working on Jubilee puzzle #1 ... and finally approaching closure, but as is so often the case, the last couple of hundred pieces are the hardest and this was a hard puzzle to begin with!

Anyhow, I started a second puzzle to give myself some relief ... and picked another hard one! Country Romance by Educa is one of their black & white series. Usually they have one or two bits of color and then the rest is black and white and gray and gray and gray ... As you can see, I have the easy part done.

new puzzles ...

Sometime last year I backed a kickstarter from Bone Owl Puzzles ... I recently received the puzzles. Turns out I accidentally ordered two of the same and left one out ... when I posted pics on facebook and mentioned that, Allison Tanner of Bone Owl offered to send me the missing one ... for free!! Pretty amazing! I haven't started one of the puzzles yet but I will keep everyone posted!

ted one of the puzzles yet but I will keep everyone posted!

Cabin Fever ... progress

making some progress, the purple is mostly done, working now on the house and the surrounding green ... 'green hell'

2018 Reading Goals ...

I've fallen short of my goal to read 100 books in both 2016 and 2017, so I've modified my goal to 75 books for 2018. Also I've revised my method of keeping track of my reading by counting pages rather than completed books ... since a 1000 page book counts the same as 75 page graphic novel. I'm aiming to average 100 pages/day ... which should come out to somewhere north of 35,000 pages for the year. Since most books come in somewhere between 250-350 pages, this should put me in the neighborhood of 100 books read ... we will see. As of this morning as I check my spreadsheet I see that I've read 4095 pages over 13 books (315 pages per book average) ... for an average of ~93 pages a day .. a bit behind but I've had a couple of stretches of zero-page days in there. 

More puzzling ...

as part of the Facebook 'Theme of the Month' puzzle group, I completed this puzzle for the theme 'Emotions' ... pretty easy 500-piece Cobble Hill titled 'Love Triangle'. Nice big pieces ... Diane helped with it and we enjoyed it very much!

first in 2018 ...

Things continue to go smoothly here in Michigan. Being retired is a bit boring I have to admit ... but reading, gardening (indoors this time of year), puzzling, and boardgaming take up my days. I will seek some part time employment come spring though, for the extra $$ as well as something to do.

This puzzle was started at the end of January as part of the FaceBook group World Puzzle Jubilee. It's turned out to be quite difficult ... 2000 pieces is a lot, and there's a lot of color gradation ... I've spent the last week working on purple.

'Cabin Fever' by Kim Norlien -- Buffalo Games

here's some closeups, the phone camera doesn't capture the colors very well

Fifty Shades of Purple