EVERYTHING IS NEU

TITLE: NEUSCHWANSTEIN CASTLE
MANUFACTURER:  SCHMIDT
PIECES: 1000
MOVIES: A KILLER IN THE FAMILY, SMOOTH TALK
TV: TALES FROM THE CRYPT

April 17, 2018

Hold on a second, my last puzzle was from November 2016, and now this one is April of 2018, did I give up on puzzles for a year and a half?  No, absolutely not.  I've just decided to switch up the format up a bit and do away with the chronological progression and now I will skip around at my whim.  Why?  Because it's new, that's why, and everything I will do now is new (well, new to me).  I just moved into a new apartment, doing puzzles on a new coffee table under new lights, new housemate, taking a new way to work, writing this at a new coffee shop.  Everything new!  

Ok, obviously not everything is new, but it has been a big change. Precipitating this big change was a lovely 40% rent increase at the apartment I lived at for 8 years by the new owners (gotta love living in Seattle).  It's never ideal having to move when you are not prepared for it, and the first few weeks of searching for a new place quickly dashed my hopes of ever finding anything that was even close to being comparable to my place in either price or square footage.  But being a Bergman, it often feels like we just have a knack at turning lemons into lemonade, and it just so happened that my sister Jolie was juggling a handful of lemons herself and we came up with the idea of getting a two bedroom apartment to share.

So far, it's been an absolutely great decision.  The apartment is amazing, the view is amazing, the elevator is amazing, the actually having a fan over the stove is amazing.  For the first time in my adult life, I'm actually living in a place that I truly love.  It's a place that I feel like I can call my castle.

Oh wow, what an unexpected and totally unintentional segue into talking about the puzzle.  This here is Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany.  A very popular castle, not only for tourists, but also apparently puzzle makers too because this is 1 of 5 (yes 5!) puzzles I've done of this place.  Each one is surprisingly different though, so the deja vu feelings are not triggered too much while working on them.  I like this one a lot because its taking at an odd high angle so that there is no sky in the puzzle.  This messes up my usual method of starting from the sky, but everything is new!, so thats ok.  There's also a lot of green, which I've already explained is problematic.  Overall, a pretty challenging puzzle but I remember it fondly.

THE RIGHT WAY

TITLE: UNKNOWN
MANUFACTURER:  MILTON BRADLEY
PIECES:  1000
MOVIE:  GETTING IT RIGHT

NOVEMBER 16TH, 2016

Even though it was still early in my puzzle assembling career, by this time I pretty much had my method down.  I always, without exception, put the sky together first. It's almost always the most easily identifiable pieces in the box so they are easy to pull out first.  I put the sky edge pieces together first and then, if possible, put together the bottom edge of the sky, creating an enclosed area.  Since I sit on my sofa and put the puzzle together on my coffee table, I found putting all the edge pieces together first forces me to lean uncomfortably over the table to put the top together.  This is why I work more or less from the top down.

After completing the sky, I usually move to the area down.  Often times it's something like mountains, or a town, or in this case, a castle.  Now let me tell you about castles.  If there's one thing I love more than puzzles, it's castles (haha tricked you).  I'm sure I'll get into castle discussion in a future post because god knows how many of these damn puzzles feature a castle.

As I work my way down the puzzle, I oftentimes have to skip around to areas that are more distinctive.  Its easier to do areas that are lighter first.  You can obviously see more detail in the lighter areas so its good to get them out of the way.  The hardest part is usually areas of trees or shrubbery.  I usually try to avoid puzzles with too much greenery on them.  It just gets too tedious and I honestly lack the patience for that.  Sorry trees, learn from castles and stop being lame.

A WHOLE LOTTA GREEN

TITLE:  FRENCH CHATEAU
MANUFACTURER:  MILTON BRADLEY
PIECES:  1000
MOVIES:  THE COLOR OF MONEY, THE FLY II

November 11, 2016

If there's one thing I hate more than missing puzzle pieces, it's running jokes that go on too long.  So don't expect to see a post begin like this EVER AGAIN!

This was a fairly standard puzzle.  Like I posted earlier, a common format is sky-castle-boats-water, well, another really common one is sky-castle-bushes-flowers.  I'm not a big fan of the bushes in these puzzles, honestly.  Each piece is pretty indistinct and its usually pretty tedious work to do them, especially when it's all one uniform color and texture, like this one.  I like bushes in real life though, so the lingering appreciation for them helps me power through the monotony.

The missing pieces are unfortunate, but at least they allow you to easily see the odd shape of the pieces.  This looked like a pretty old puzzle and I can't recall seeing pieces shaped like that on the more modern puzzles.  I might totally be wrong about that, we shall see as we go through these.  I do like the pieces though, the make it a little bit easier, especially with the dreaded bushes.