Over Rated

Ken and I began doing jigsaw puzzles during the pandemic when we were super bored and found one in a cupboard that belonged to Kate. It was Niagara Falls, all lit up, and by the time we were finished, we were hooked. Up to that point, I’d never done a jigsaw puzzle in my life and scoffed at the whole notion. Now, it’s rare not to see the puzzle board set up on our kitchen island. But good puzzles can be pricey, so we quite often get them second hand, and do swaps with my parents, who are masters at the puzzle game.

Last week, they came over with a stack, which I tucked in the closet until I was done with my latest, a 1000 piece Ravensburger that’s no longer available but that I was obsessed with. It’s called The Sanctuary of Knowledge and I’d been looking for it for ages. I finally found it on Facebook marketplace and drove quite a way to get it. I put it together, only to discover that it was missing FOUR PIECES. All that effort and no payoff. So I went to the closet and pulled out a nice 300 piece that I could do for a quick dopamine hit. I opened the box, dumped out the pieces, and saw this:

And there are so many things to unpack here. First, “Ken and June” (and I feel even more salty about the dude being named Ken because MY Ken would never do this), you two BOUGHT the puzzle. “Too short”?! Did you not see the GIANT “300 PIECES” written on the box? How long did you THINK it was going to take?

Second, who exactly are you rating this for? You gave it to a THRIFT STORE—was your intention to convey to random strangers who will never meet you that you are sophisticated and world-weary puzzle aficionados? “Ah, yes, you plebians at Goodwill might be satisfied with a mere 300 pieces, but to us, it was a waste of our precious time. We crave the chaos of frustration; give us not the ease of rapidity.”

Also, the rating was on the INSIDE of the box, so it wouldn’t even help a potential puzzler make a decision.

And what kind of rating system IS this anyway? You docked the puzzle THREE WHOLE POINTS for taking exactly as long as a 300 piece puzzle should take? That’s like me getting a 1-star review for my first novel, which very clearly states on the cover that it’s about a sixteen-year-old girl, from a 70-year-old man who didn’t like it because it was about a sixteen-year-old girl. SERIOUSLY.

But despite the terrible rating from “Ken and June”, I did the puzzle anyway, and really enjoyed it. Then I got to the end and no, there weren’t any pieces missing this time; in fact, there was one EXTRA piece that didn’t even belong to this “short” puzzle. I just hope Ken and June didn’t give the puzzle it belonged to a 10 out of 10, because they’ve lost the little credibility they had left:

Puzzle person: Ooh, I can’t wait to do this 2000 piece puzzle…what’s this written inside the box? “A masterful creation, complex and time-consuming, but well worth the Herculean effort. 10 out of 10”, signed “Ken and June”. What a ringing endorsement!

Four days later…

Puzzle person (staring at completed 2000 piece puzzle with one piece missing): Curse you, Ken and June! Curse you straight to hell!

It’s Puzzling, Isn’t It?

Ken and I love to do jigsaw puzzles. We usually have one going in the kitchen where we can take a minute and pop in a few pieces between other work. I find it relaxing and I think there’s proven evidence that you get a little dopamine rush when a piece clicks. But sometimes I wonder about the people who design them, like what choices are they making with the illustrations? Case in point, last week, we got a new Charles Wysocki puzzle. Charles Wysocki was an American painter who specialized in “primitive Americana”. If you’ve ever done a Wysocki puzzle, you know it heavily features this idyllic view of late 1800s towns with a LOT of American flags everywhere, and as a Canadian, I find this weird, because I’ve never done a Canadian puzzle covered in OUR flag, but sometimes there are also clocks, so it all evens out. This week, though, I opened up the new puzzle and looked at the poster, excited to discover that all the buildings were antique stores and curiosity shops. “Oh, wow!” I said to Ken. “Look at all the cool stuff in the windows of these antique stores!” He agreed that it was going to be a lot of fun, considering we have an antique business ourselves, and I started to build the frame. But then I looked closer and something dawned on me: the painting the puzzle was based on represented life in the 1800s, and all the people were wearing old-timey clothes and driving horses and buggies so NONE OF THE THINGS IN THE WINDOWS WOULD BE ANTIQUES! The stuff in the stores were things that those people would have used every single day and probably thought were modern conveniences, like the railroad lantern, the ironstone china, and the coffee grinder. If they wanted to be truly authentic and antique, shouldn’t the stores have sarcophaguses or suit of armour at least? So unless this town is one of those places where actors are all dressed up and pretend to be pioneers for the tourists, it’s seriously out of whack.

And it reminded me of the time that I started working on a Dowdle puzzle, which are based on the work of a different American artist, Eric Dowdle. This one was of Peggy’s Cove in Canada, which is strange considering he was from Utah, but it does explain the presence of a random Mountie standing by a flagpole, like that’s just what Mounties do all the time or whatnot. I started to piece the edge together as one does and immediately discovered that one of the pieces was all chewed up and distorted, like a dog had eaten it and spat (or sh*t) it back out. Oh well, I thought, at least it’s not missing, because I HATE when a puzzle has a missing piece, and I think I’ve written about suspecting Atlas of stealing puzzle pieces before. But it got worse. See, there are a lot of tiny human (?) figures in the puzzle, and as I started to pull them out, it became clear that the artist who designed it was, perhaps, really more into horror stories than pastoral scenes of a harbour town.

Like, OK, it’s bad enough that there are 4 dudes in three-piece suits and fedoras standing on a rock looking like they all want to talk to me about Jesus, and numerous people are hoisting giant lobsters in the air and swinging them around like that’s a completely normal activity (and maybe it is in Peggy’s Cove–I’m going there in August so I’ll keep you posted) but then, in the background, there’s this guy:

What the absolute f*ck is this guy doing, crawling out over a rock towards you like that girl from The Ring?! You don’t notice him at first, because there’s so much else going on, what with all the proselytizing and lobster waving, but once you do, HE’S ALL YOU SEE. And then suddenly it seems like maybe instead of an idyllic fishing village, this is a zombie town, and all the figures are now ominous and the lobsters are screaming for help. In the poster that came with the puzzle, he appeared to be wearing large, weird mittens on his hands, and I really didn’t want to find the rest of him in case he came to life and started crawling over the back of my couch.

So anyway, I’ll keep doing my Wysocki–I just won’t look too closely at the horses’ eyes, just in case they’re devil horses or something, because you never know…

Quilt Update

I was partway through row 11, when my second sewing machine once again lost its mind and refused to work, I threw down my denim patch in dismay and announced that I was going to find someone to finish it for me. This is not “giving up”. This is simply a recognition that there are things I’m good at, and things I’m not. So I went in search of someone who was better at sewing than me. I posted an ad on the local Facebook page, and that was a bit of a bust, giving me only advice on how to fix my machine. I did get one offer to come over and “consult” because the quilter in question was “very particular” about her projects and didn’t want it to look like two different people had done the quilt and I didn’t realize that was even a thing, because I am not particular AT ALL. But then Ken mentioned that the lady across the street had said she taught sewing once, so on Monday, I walked over and interrupted her mowing her lawn to inquire about her willingness to help me out. A long shot, some might say, but she immediately said “Sure”, that she could try a few rows to see.

I bundled some up and gave them to her in a bag. Less than half an hour later, I saw her coming up my sidewalk carrying the bag, and my heart sunk. She’d changed her mind, obviously. But no. As it turned out, she’s a VERY GOOD sewer, unlike me, and had done the three rows in the time it took me to sew one patch and swear at my machine like a sailor. The next day she called me over to look at all the now-completed rows, laid out on her living room floor, and I was a little overwhelmed and very grateful. Also, my carefully/haphazardly chosen pattern looked awesome. She’s going to finish the whole thing for me, and if she gets it done by Christmas, that’s still faster than I would have been able to do it.

*Speaking of kind things that people do, and speaking of Feasting Upon The Bones, if you bought it and liked it, could you leave a review? In exchange, I’ll name a character after you in the next collection, which I’m already working on now that I’ve contracted out the quilt and have all this free time.