This was about half done at the hospital while I was getting nuked.  I didn't get too much time to work on it because even though I was a bit early to appointments they were almost always ready for me straight away.  A couple of days I had time to work on it, and stayed late on the penultimate nuking day to finish it.

Another Neuschwanstein jigsaw.  I found there was a 6x9 repeating rectangle pattern which made it easier to figure out which shaped piece I would need next for any given space.  Which sure was handy in all that shrubbery!  You could also tell which way up pieces went.  Still undecided whether to keep this one.

A fun 1500 piece jigsaw from the Green Shed 

Supposedly you can use the backing colours to make sorting easier, but that's a bit dumb because then you have to turn over all the pieces twice.  The coloured backing had come off a bunch of the pieces, but they were still in the box, so we reglued them back on after this was taken.

The guys did this while I was WFH for months.  Or rather they sorted it but didn't get very far with it, just some of the sky and head and yellow bits.  I finished it for them when I came back to work.

For my birthday in 2015 the sweetie got me a 1000 piece jigsaw which was a gradient of all different colours.  Loved it!!  It was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it.

So for Christmas 2015 I asked for the 5000 piece version of the same picture.

I spread all the pieces out and arranged by colour.

There was a lot of green!!

And finished!

This wasn't grid cut, it was random cut, which made it quite tricky

The problem was.. 

IT WAS UTTER TRASH!!!  Absolutely crap.  Terrible quality.  Clemens Habicht 5000 Colours Jigsaw Puzzle by Lamington Drive Editions was a TERRIBLE jigsaw.

Here's why.

The printing was crap.  LIke this is not a nice gradient.  It's like they printed the different sections of the jigsaw separately.

It was not even applied to the cardboard very well

The printing was bad enough.  The cutting was SHOCKING.

Pieces weren't cut through properly

Or they were damaged

And that wasn't even the worst part of the poor cutting.

Look at this trash.  They didn't bother to line up the sections after the first cut so things don't align

And another side effect of the poor alignment was that pieces were actually broken!!!

And even completely missing parts!

And the final insult.  There was a piece actually missing!!! (sorry about the out of focus photo I never got a closeup)

Now if this had been a regular jigsaw I might have given this company the benefit of the doubt and assumed I had lost it *somehow* .. even when you look at the space I was working on it.. there's nowhere it could have disappeared to..

But due to all the other problems with this terrible quality jigsaw, I guarantee it was never there.

I was so upset by this jigsaw I couldn't blog about it.  For nearly ten years.  If I had bought it myself I absolutely would have demanded a refund for it.  But the sweetie bought it, and he's allergic to confrontation.  So I have $150 worth of rubbish sitting on a shelf downstairs.  I doubt I could even sell it.  Maybe will just have to donate it to Vinnies or something.  With a warning how bad it is. 

Do not buy Clemens Habicht 5000 Colours Jigsaw Puzzle by Lamington Drive Editions.

This came mostly done packaged up in another jigsaw I got at the Green Shed (two for one!).  But since there was no box, I fixed it up, took a photo, then pulled it apart to do another day.  Finally got around to doing it.  I didn't look at the picture while I was doing it, didn't really need to.  Not a great jigsaw - everything very furry and out of focus.  Printed out the photo and stuck it on a box to pack it up.

I think this was from the Green Shed from ages ago.  I've got a version of this of Sydney, so it was fun to do London.  

First there's the 1666 city map

Then the modern city map

Then you have all the little buildings!

Complete

Some closeups of the buildings.

These next three were from Crossy.

Flight of Fantasy.  Very soft

Confabulation of Dragons.  I thought it should have been called a Conflagration of Dragons.  Lots of dragons!

Lady Unicorn.  There was a lot of red in this!

This was from R&F for my birthday.  I was a bit annoyed about the edges - they were cut identically so you couldn't tell whether they were correct or not.  Which would have been fine if there was any distinguishing features, but for the most part there wasn't, they were all just dark.

Here's an example of how the edges would fit even if they were wrong

And finished!

SPOILERS!!!

Once the jigsaw is complete you then need to solve six puzzles from clues in the picture.  So three of the puzzles I got right.  One was a maths problem, but it was one of those linear arithmetic problems where if you don't do the "correct" method of multiplying first you get a different answer.  So I wasn't sure which way they'd do it so got two possible answers.  One I got with a hint, but it depended on the edge pieces being in the right position, which I wasn't sure about.  The last one I essentially got, but took myself off on a tangent because I was overthinking it.

So yeah as it turned out, you needed the edges to be the same for the "solution" to work.

Weirdly, they include all the offcuts, which they tell you you can discard.  The only reason I can think of that they'd do this is that because the edge pieces are so necessary for the solution that they don't want them to get discarded accidentally during packaging.  

We borrowed this from another floor.  I didn't do a huge amount of it, just helped out here and there.

Yeah I'm a bit behind!!

I can't remember where this came from.  Possibly Green Shed.  It was somewhat evil, but mainly because the pieces were super similar and you could put wrong ones in and they'd fit.

This I got with a voucher I gor for my 50th.  How pretty is this?  Did it quite quickly.

I think we found this on another floor at work and took it to do.

I think this was from the Green Shed.  Quite easy and I did it quite quickly, so took it to work for the guys to do.

This one T/J gave me earlier in the year

I think this was from the Green Shed.  Photomosaic jigsaws are super tricky.  The world bits were a lot easier because they weren't just dark squares.

Neuschwanstein!  I think from the Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction.  Pretty sure this was actually sealed when I got it.  Not sure if I'll keep it though.

I think this was from the Green Shed, possibly Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction. Pity it was missing so many pieces.

A Harry Potter jigsaw from the Green Shed ages ago.  Not a fun jigsaw.  The whole thing is furry (out of focus) and very dark.  

This was the mandala jigsaw that we coloured, so I wanted to do it again with the colours.

Monday.  21st.  Did I mention I'm doing low carb again for another few weeks? Except the day got off to a rocky start because I'd forgotten about an apple that needed eating. There goes my carb limit for the day.. whoops. The sweetie prepped a cauliflower bake and brussels sprouts for dinner and I chucked a chunk of beef in to go with it. I got my blogging done quite early. Funny how writing up notes properly during the week makes blogging a lot quicker on a Sunday.. or Monday in this case. DS9 2.24.

Tuesday.  Awake from Dentist Time for hours and only broken sleep after that. Sigh. NEIL at work, as well as trying to figure out the API of our IP management system to help someone with something. Leftovers for dinner, DS9 2.25. After dinner started going through Dad's photos (from when he switched from slides to prints and onwards) to get photos of Mum. Annoyingly Dad had a really bad habit of over-enhancing his photos. At least with the prints I can go back and rescan them, but for digital photos once they're enhanced at all they're destroyed because he didn't keep the originals. Which is odd in itself because he used to make backups upon backups upon backups, just not of the original unaltered files. #grunt.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok. Really wanted to get through some decom prep but the interruptions Would. Not. Stop. All. Day. So damned hard to concentrate with Teams and Outlook popping up every five seconds. Seriously considering turning all notifications off. The sweetie cooked creamy mushroom chicken for dinner which was very nice.

DS9 2.26. Then more photo picking. From 2010 and some of 2011 Dad saved the raw camera photos off separately to the enhanced photos. That was nice of him. Maybe there were other copies of the rest of his digital camera photos elsewhere that either he or I lost. More likely him. I spent an entire week one Christmas trying to sort it all out, and would definitely have kept any raw photos if I'd found them. Knowing him he probably made several backups, thought he had a backup, didn't in fact have a backup, and deleted the original. Or maybe he just never thought he'd need his originals. Silly Dad.

Thursday.  Slept okish until about 5:00. Mostly decom work at work. Bar 59 for drinks which was quite pleasant, although a lot more expensive than work drinks! Made pizzas then DS9 3.1.

Friday.  Anzac Day.  Lest we forget.  Awake from 1:45 for hours sigh.

House stuff mostly in the morning. Happy that Stumpy is basking more and is more enthusiastic about food.  Did some camera testing in the afternoon. Only to realise later I had it on the wrong mode. Sigh.

I need to find a spot to plant out these chrysanthemums.  I accidentally uprooted one of the ones out the front the other month and chucked it in a pot out the back.  They're now happily flowering while the ones out the front are barely hanging on to life.  These things like a lot of sun but our garden is completely hopeless so not sure where I can put them.  

Kievs for dinner.  With half a cauliflower and most of a capsicum.

DS9 3.2. Then watched Blackberry which made us both a little nostalgic. Also, it's Anzac Day but I've only worn a jumper like twice all year. Usually by now there would have been days where we'd be wanting to put the heater on in advance of the Anzac Day allowed starting date. Instead I had a window open in my room to cool it down so I could sleep.  hrmmm.

Saturday.  Slept mostly okish.

Cooked cheese kranskis and miso scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Although Stu just had eggs because he needed to only eat soft food to not break his temporary tooth crown again.

Started a jigsaw. Went for a several hour drive with the sweetie, checking out previous houses, family houses, the church we got married in etc. Was a lovely way to spend a few hours with the sweetie (and we drove like 70km!). 

Made a small share platter for lunch (although I did get hungry later)

Finished the jigsaw. Got Chong Co delivered for dinner (after the MenuLog driver finally turned up) and watched DS9 3.3, then The Princess Bride :)

Sunday.  Awake from ~3:30 and never got back to sleep. Sigh.  They promised many millimetres of rain.  We got about three drops.

Went and saw Constellations at the NFSA with Tony which was a bit of fun. House stuff mostly for the rest of the day, and some food shopping.

When you realise you have 15 different cheeses in the fridge.. whoops...

Filled with rage in the afternoon at Optus who FORCE you to use international roaming because there's no way to disable it. Their only workaround is leave the phone on flight mode and use wifi. WTF??? I think I did read somewhere that if you have a second sim you can disable the Optus one. Which would work unless I needed to receive an SMS for two factor for anything. But there's a heap of horror stories out there from people getting charged the $5/day even when the sim wasn't even in the phone!!!

Hi.

Sunday.  13th.  Apple cider pulled pork and lots of veggies for dinner. I didn't measure out the apple cider vinegar this time so it was a little tangier than last time, and I also added less water in the gravy which made it a lot quicker to cook. Yum yum yum. DS9 2.18. Then watched the start of a new season (for me) of Air Crash Investigations. First time I'd watched any since 2021!!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. Busy morning before work, busy day at work. The new version of Outlook sux donkeyballs. They shrunk down the ribbon so my quicksteps are now hidden behind a drop down menu. So now my quicksteps take twice as long because I have to click the drop down then click my action. And no way to customise it. They broke the categories/colours on our shared calendar so everything is grey and I can't create a new category to match the common ones. And every time I move a mail to a folder it pops up a stoopidly annoying "You've moved a mail, Undo" message RIGHT OVER THE NEXT MAIL I WANT TO READ. Microsoft is so trash. Ok got my ribbon and action buttons back by choosing Classic Ribbon. Leftovers for dinner, DS9 2.19. OMFG this is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time!!!! Don't even know what I did with my evening. I know there was some looking at optional tours for the Greece cruise. The extra tours practically double the day cost of the cruise. hrmmm.

The second half of the ramen pack, with leftover pulled pork

Tuesday.  Took *ages* to get to sleep :( The Old Reader's CDNs are working again today hurray (they'd been broken for a few days). Found another bug in new Outlook. I only have one mail rule. It wasn't working. When I went to look at it I got the error "This rule can't be edited or viewed in Outlook for Windows". Found this page which said it was to do with the "mark as read" rule. So I turned that off in Classic, sure enough it can now be edited in 365.  Nearly had a meltdown over how much time I've wasted on Microsoft TRASH. Another "feature" is they've turned off the nice little count down the bottom which shows you how many messages you have in a folder. Ok at least you can see, but you have to hover over the folder to see it. Meeting notifications are dumb. Old version you could just hit snooze and it would automatically popup again at the five minute mark, hit snooze again and it would pop up at meeting start time. New version you have to hover, then click on snooze, then click a time to snooze. And even then it doesn't work properly, repeating notifications. Also whenever I even look away from Outlook, it navigates me to the top of my inbox, which are my oldest messages. So I'm constantly having to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see my newest messages. Went to get a Covid vaccine at lunch (been like eighteen months since I got my last one). Also spent a 50th birthday gift card. I probably should have looked around more for some cool games or something, but ended up just buying a couple of jigsaws. The sweetie cooked cabbage and bacon for dinner. DS9 2.20.

Wednesday.  Took quite a while to get to sleep and still woke up before 6. First meltdown of the day - the barrel fell out of my locker again at work, but no Connor around today to help me fix it. Took like ten minutes to get it back in. Second meltdown of the day - losing my mind over some proxy configs - turned out Wardie did a sneaky add and remove of a policy which confused me no end. All the middle of a MICROSOFT problem on the proxies that we spent literally all day on, and still haven't resolved. Microsoft is utter TRASH. Third meltdown of the day - YELLOW LIGHTS. I did have a nice birthday lunch with DC though. DS9 2.21.

Thursday.  Slept mostly okish. More trash today. Gave up and went back to Outlook Classic, which made me feel a whole lot better. Microsoft is almost entirely responsible for my very strong desire to retire early.  Super quiet drinks, just our group. Pizzas, DS9 2.22.

Good Friday.  Not so great for Jesus back in the day.  Slept mostly okish. Went for a walk then mostly holiday planning. Tuna bake and veggies for dinner. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Saturday.  Slept mostly okish. Went for a walk then mostly holiday planning. Finished my galah Diamond Dotz and did one of my birthday jigsaws. Steak and salad for dinner. DS9 2.23, then Death in Paradise 14.6.

Easter Sunday.  Christ has risen.  So did the sun in a nice way.

Slept mostly okish. Went for a walk. On the way back a group of kids (and parents) were out in their pyjamas doing an Easter egg hunt around one of the playgrounds. Funny.  Mostly house stuff in the morning. Mostly holiday stuff in the afternoon. Leftovers for dinner then Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Monday.  Somewhat restless sleep and thermoregulation issues. Another quiet day - bit of house stuff, bit of holiday stuff, food shopping (which was super quiet which was nice).

I really could get used to four day weekends....

Sunday.  9th.  Got home from the coast and spent some time doing Dotz, then closing off browser tabs.  I really feel like I need to spend less time on the computer/internet/phone... hrmmmm.  Downloaded photos from the week and blogged the last two weeks and some of the coast weekend.  Leftover mince with cauliflower rice and cheese for dinner.  Death in Paradise 14.1.  Somehow managed to lose a BRAND NEW HAIR TIE!!!  Had a slight meltdown because I'd been out of sorts all day, and this just sent me over the edge.  

Monday.  Went to bed early (like 20:30) but woke up at 12:45 and stayed awake for HOURS.  Sigh.  So not transfunctionating during the day.  Mostly just did house stuff during the day, which all took a lot longer than normal because I wasn't transfunctionating.  Finally finally got a bit of rain around 18:00 (even the weeds are dying at the moment!!).  Need to bribe the little brother into visiting before daylight savings finishes so I can see what I'm cooking.  Had lamb chops from Chris's and cabbage for dinner.  I never used to like lamb chops growing up because they were just too damned fiddly with all the fat and bones.  After forty years (and almost never having eaten them in the meantime) I have to say my opinion hasn't changed much.  Sure they're tasty, but just too annoying.

Tried to watch Stranger Things but nothing would connect to the Chromecast, even after rebooting it, the wifi and Stu's phone.  Did a bit of a Google and found everyone on the internet complaining about it.  Enshittification much??  We ended up watching a bit of Hard Quiz.  I think I could answer ONE question - football, meat pies, <what> and Holden cars?

Tuesday.  Slightly early night.  Actually slept quite well.  Hurray.  NEIL at work, who was off getting bits of him chopped out.  Chromecast still down.  Turns out an intermediate certificate expired so stuff couldn't authenticate.  I wonder if Google are debating whether or not to fix it or let the generation 2 devices all just die and force people to buy new ones.  I imagine that would piss off enough people that they would refuse to buy anything Google again.  I also got my quarterly reminder at work to check for expiring certificates coming up in the next quarter.  If only Google had done that.

Wednesday.  The brother type person called me while I was at lunch.  He could come TONIGHT.  Except I didn't have a new light to install yet.  He suggested Bunnings.  I walked up to Project Lighting instead.  They had a record of what we bought last time and I got something similar.  Not the same of course.  No no no.  Maybe that's a good thing though because turns out Mercator Franklin lights are TRASH!!!  Seriously LED lights should last years and years and years.  Not SIX years!!  And it's not like you can just replace a bulb, now you have to REPLACE THE WHOLE DAMNED FITTING!!! #hate  Anyways, so David picked me up after work and installed the new light! Hurray!!  Bestest brother ever. 

Had a few drinks and chatted then he got a bee in his bonnet to setup the PS3 to be able to use Netflix and Amazon Prime.  Did I mention I have the bestest brother ever?? :)

Thursday.  Woke up around 2:45 for several hours.  Sigh.  Although surprisingly unzombielike. 

NEIL again for the day.  Julian's farewell at drinks which was nice (I called the Japanese whisky, but not Lego Himeji Castle :) ).  Pizza with blue cheese for dinner!

DS9 1.13.  Another dumb episode.

Friday.  Slept fairly well.  NEIL at work.  Brown Food Friday!!!

DS9 1.14 and Death in Paradise 14.2.

Saturday.  Went to bed at 21:30 but didn't get to sleep til after 00:30.  Sigh.  Then meh sleep.  So twice this week I've had crap sleep the night before a day off.  Sigh.  Zombie morning, mostly house stuff.  Did some Dotz and even did a jigsaw in the late afternoon - 500 pieces in an hour and a quarter flat!  I asked the sweetie what's for dinner?  His response:

Google fixed the Chromecast issue.  Haven't looked up what they did.  Watched DS9 1.14.  Another meh episode.  Does DS9 actually get any better?  Most of season 1 is lame.  Stranger Things 1.5.  They finally banded together after all attackings things separately.  Reminded me in one place of E.T.  :)  

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got a bee in my bonnet to write a script to swap out Picasa database directories.  And spent a chunk of the day tagging people in photos.  Whoops.  Also gave Neil a lift to the hospital for antibiotics (did you know "hospital at home" is a thing?  You stay home but have to pop into the hospital every day for treatment.  Advantages and disadvantages - nice that you can hang out in your own house but a pain to have to trek into the hospital every day). 

Also.  Why TF does windoze reset the sort order of my directories EVERY DAMNED TIME IT REBOOTS???  Far out it pisses me off.

Have had like three drops of rain this afternoon.  So much for showers.  

This was one Duncan found at a garage sale or something, but originally from the National Gallery.  It was actually factory sealed so I was pretty grunty that once again they managed to lose pieces from it.

However, the quality was so shocking that it's entirely possible the pieces were never there.  Basically the pieces are *almost* identical in shape, which means they'd fit on three sides and *still* be wrong.  The bits where there was colour it wasn't so bad, but the black bit in the corner couldn't be finished without redoing the twenty-odd pieces over and over again until the right combination could be found.  I said screw that, and shoved them in any old way for the photo.

Given it was from the National Gallery it was probably expensive, I'd have been pissed if I'd bought this new.

Not sure where this one came from.  May have been the common area.  I recognise the mountains on the far side from our cruise up and down Lake Como in 2022, but haven't gotten around to finding out where this was taken.  Edit: It was taken in Bellagio - Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 24 looking down Salita Serbelloni.

This was a Ravensburger 1500 piece jigsaw I picked up at the Green Shed, so it was impressive that it was complete.  The problem is all that blue.  I did this downstairs and was able to get everything else done last summer.  But it sat untouched over winter because it was just too damned hard.  In spring I decided it really needed doing by the end of the year and if I did five pieces a day it'd get done.  Did that for a while and eventually was able to get going on it a bit faster and finished it late November.

I can't remember where this one came from.  I'm pretty sure it got started when David was living here though, or maybe during a visit.  It's trash though - the pieces are almost identical and fit when they're wrong.  Life is too short for trashy jigsaws so I didn't even get back into it, just laid it out for a photo and packed it all up.  This was by Holdson / Ambassador if you're looking for brands to avoid.

This was a nice 500 piece jigsaw from the Green Shed that said "complete".  Yeah not anymore it's not.  This is why you store your puzzles in baggies people, to stop handfuls of pieces at a time being lost all over the Green Shed floor..

This one of the Exhibition Building in Melbourne was another Holdson/Ambassador jigsaw from the same series as the trash "Autumn Scene, Victoria" one above.  I was all set to put this one away again untouched if the cut had been the same.  But it was a better cut.  Not perfect and pieces would still fit even when wrong, but it wasn't too bad in the end, and even more impressive that it was complete, given it was another Green Shed jigsaw.

And this one of Asakusa and the Sky Tree in Tokyo we borrowed from the common area.

I borrowed this from the common area, and I actually dismantled it so I knew it was complete.  And guess what.  They lost pieces from it.  Probably down the gap between the bench and the wall.  Pretty grunty about it actually.

A Green Shed one of Toronto we did at work.

We did this one earlier in the year, and we spent ages colouring it in.  I want to have another go at doing it with colour.

Lord of the Rings jigsaw I borrowed from the common area.  I actually did another copy of this ten years ago.

S brought in these next two, assuring us there were probably pieces missing.  

The first one of St Thomas (been there!!) had three missing pieces.

The 3D tiger only had one missing piece, which she was pretty impressed with.

Before I went to Tasmania I pulled this out for the guys to do while I was going to be literally right there.  It was a Green Shed jigsaw but I'm pretty sure it was actually new (I seem to remember opening the packet for it).  So I was a bit grunty that they lost a piece.

This is my photo taken in the same spot

A few of Rosina's

And one of New York by night that we did at work, also a Green Shed one I think.

Man I miss the Green Shed.  Will have to see what the Goodies Junction crap is like.