As it happened (from my Journal archives)

August 27, 2003

10:11 pm - Went up to Julian this afternoon. Some thunderstorms in the mountains again today and I wanted pictures as well as a nice break. I found that I can use a puzzle press clamp to hold my camera's broken battery holder together (tape doesn't work because the springs are too strong), so I was able to take pictures without problems. While I did hear some thunder and ran into some rain, the storms were fairly mild.

After I returned I decided I wanted to start cutting the August eBay puzzle and ended up cutting about 130 pieces. The puzzle will have around 500 pieces and I'm going to attempt to complete it tomorrow. I'm cutting it in Long Round with no figurals. In retrospect I should have had some figurals as the white sky is going to be very, very difficult to assemble. The sky is mostly cut. To mitigate the difficulty I'm making the edges 100% interlocking.

August 28, 2003

6:58 pm - Worked all day cutting Coastline, Izu-Hanto Peninsula, the 31st puzzle of the 100 Puzzle Project, and completed it. The puzzle has around 500 pieces, plus one "surprise" figural.... it seems that The Vine added three more female buds today, two of them appeared on the vine for a total of four and the fifth one trans-dimensionally projected itself in the puzzle!

September 5, 2003

10:37 am - I'm just past the three hour mark in assembling Coastline, Izu-Hanto Peninsula, the current Auction puzzle. I've completed all but the interior sky pieces - of these I've placed just a few pieces. It's interesting how just a little color line cutting can leave some "annoying" uncompleted spots that take a while to do! If I could cut the puzzle over again, I would have added a little more clc. The puzzle is quite challenging; few of the Seewalds I've cut have taken me this long to assemble. However, I fear the sky is going to be very difficult, maybe extremely difficult - the subtle variations in white are really too hard to "lock" in the mind for doing piece searching, although I have assembled some of the more "creamy" pieces in the lower right sky section.

6:05 pm - I completed asembly the puzzle this afternoon, took 4 1/4 hours total.